Davide La Montagna
































Davide La Montagna's practice investigates love as an ambivalent and transformative force, attentive to the tensions that emerge within relations of desire, intimacy, and power. Working across installation, performance, writing, sculpture, video, and drawing, La Montagna approaches art-making as a process of evocation—bringing to the surface obscured or forgotten narratives shaped by violence, control, and affective dependency. Hiding functions as a key methodological strategy in his work and is closely linked to his reflection on sexuality. He understands homosexuality as a continuous renegotiation of spaces, temporalities, and roles that are socially pre-assigned. This ongoing process of division and redistribution inscribes itself onto bodies, shaping both their material and affective dimensions, and reaching into the realm of intimacy. From within a system that frames "deviant" sexualities as monstrous, La Montagna's research seeks alternative modes of inhabiting and narrating experience that can bypass dominant frameworks. Language plays a central role in this process. Drawing on poetic strategies, he is interested in forms of expression that resist reduction to information or exchange, and that instead open up new, shared grounds of meaning. He often works within the framework of domesticity, reconstructing familiar environments populated by everyday objects and minor mythologies. Through poetic language and subtle forms of concealment, his practice unfolds as a gothic inquiry into love, conceived as an uncanny and potentially dangerous technology of self-transformation. Across his work, unresolved dichotomies—love and violence, visibility and invisibility, presence and absence—remain deliberately open, revealing the fragile tensions that inhabit the space between them.



Education
2025    MFA Dutch Art Institute (DAI)
2024    Evil - Ana Texeira Pinto (2nd years theory seminar) 
2023    Mean Girl Theory - Ana Texeira Pinto (1st year theory seminar) 
2016    BFA Painting, Albertina Academy of Fine Arts, Turin
2011     Diploma - Fine Art Conservation and Restoration, Liceo d’Arte Aldo Passoni, Turin



Solo Shows
2025    

I’m Half Sick of Shadows, 10documents, Rome, curated by Ginevra Ludovici              
Things Unsaid, Then Forgotten, Archivio Gribaudo, Turin, curated by Lilou Vidal

2020    

Nothing More Than Feelings, MUFANT, Turin, curated by Sergey Kanstedal & Ilenia Berra          

2018    

Lascio il nulla a nessuno, Almanac, Turin



Group Shows










































































2026  

(upcoming) Olfacta Fair, Turin
(upcoming) Corale, French Place, Milan
What Could/Should Curating Do? Final project in Ljubiana Art Week

2025    

Efemeridi. 2013-2025, Almanac, Turin
The Good Company, Iuno, Rome, curated by Giulia Gaibisso 
Open Studio w/ Virginia Ariu, Cripta747, Turin

2024    

Chez Paint It Black, Paint It Black, Turin

2023    

Del sangue, Kain III edizione Festivial Arte Nomadica, Feretino
pluriball II, final project Campo22 Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Fondazione Rusconi/Spazio Petroni, Bologna

2022    

pluriball, Campo22 Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Palazzo di Velluto, Turin           
paradise is exactly where you are right now only much, much better, Palazzo Niccolò Spinola di Luccoli, Genoa   

2021    

Avalanche, Regatta2, Düsseldorf
Vagare ai margini, Co_atto, Milan
Abbiamo invitato un po’ di artisti nello spazio, Osserevatorio Futura, Turin

2019    

Estate, autunno, State Of, Milan
Greeenhouse: Your hair, your leaves, your branches, your rivers, Almanac, Turin           
Rivolta, duo project w/ Giulia Crispiani curated by Campobase, i10 Spazi Indipendenti Art Verona    
A Jumi, BoCsArt, Cosenza
GIFC, Spaziobuonasera, Turin
Cloud, Meteor and Star Are Men Seen from Afar, Car DRDE, Bologna

2018    

Black Mirror, MAM Mario Mauroner Contemporary Art, Wien

2017    

Thinking Songs of Things, curated by Stefano Collicelli Cagol, MAM Mario Mauroner Contemporary Art, Wien

2016    

Teatrum Botanicum - Emergin Talents, PAV, Turin


Press & Writings
















2025

Some Haunted Havens of Precarious Love, Nero Editions (online)
I’m Half Sick of Shadows, Flash Art Italia (online)
Efemeridi 2013 - 2025. Mousse Magazine (online)
Things Unsaid, Then Forgotten, Contemporary Art Library (online)

2024

I Dream in Blue, text for Virginia Ariu’s exhibition What’s Got Into Me, Contemporary Art Library
Pretty People for the exhibition Pretty People curated by Antonia Rebekka Truninger, Contemporary Art Library