Tempo Rubato
Lorenzo Conforti
Curatorial text: Dinos Chatzirafailidis
22 October – 4 December 2026
Opening: Thursday, 22 October 2026, 19:00–22:00
Exhibition hours: Tuesday to Friday 14:00-20:00, Saturday 12:00-17:00, Closed Sunday & Monday
Upper Ankyle: 5 Irodotou Str., Kolonaki, Athens
Website: upperankyle.com | Instagram: @upper_ankyle
Upper Ankyle presents Tempo Rubato, the first solo exhibition in Greece by Italian artist Lorenzo Conforti, on view from 22 October to 4 December 2026. In the exhibition, new paintings are joined by a site-specific wall drawing running through the gallery and a small-scale bronze sculpture of drumsticks set into the wall, a reference to Conforti’s background in music.
The exhibition borrows its name from tempo rubato, a musical technique, basically stealing time from one note to give to another, so a phrase can rush or drag and the piece still comes out the same length in the end. The same thing happens across the show, steady as a whole, unsettled part to part. New paintings are joined by a site-specific wall drawing running through the gallery and a small-scale bronze sculpture of drumsticks set into the wall, a reference to Conforti’s background in music.
At the core of Lorenzo Conforti’s painting practice is the combination of forms drawn from different organic anatomies. Working from photographs of human, animal and plant forms—a shoulder caught mid-turn, an animal’s haunch set mid-stride, a stem bent under its own weight—the artist isolates individual fragments and brings them together into hybrid compositions that belong to no single species. These compositions are assembled according to the way each form behaves, bringing together elements drawn from otherwise unrelated sources.
Lorenzo Conforti (b. 1996, Tolentino, lives and works between Milan and Tolentino, Italy) develops a painterly practice rooted in the fusion of images drawn from heterogeneous organic anatomies. Raised between music and graffiti writing, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Urbino, where he cofounded the collective Hardchitepture (2019–2024), dedicated to the exploration of environmental and scenographic installation, before completing his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Milan.