Career
In 2009 Solmi was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the category "Video & Audio". Solmi utilizes images culled from the video game industry, internet and popular culture with a nod to history that results tongue-in-cheek collages that result in sometimes-grotesque caricatures of the modern political society. His unique process is characterized by a literal overlapping of painting and video which consists of several stages of hand-painted textures that are scanned into a 3-Doctorate video gaming program (Cry Engine) and then wrapped around 3-Doctorate models and backgrounds to create a parodic world influenced just as much by Science Fiction as it is modern tabloids and ancient history.
Most of his video works are housed in handpainted wood and plexiglass frames or embedded amidst a painting in which certain areas are cut away to more directly integrate the different media.
Such is why Solmi describes the bulk of his work as "video-paintings". Solmi"s works have been exhibited in several international Biennials, such as Frankfurt B3 Biennial of Moving image (forthcoming 2015), First Shenzhen Animation Biennial, China (2013), the 54th Venice Biennial (2011), and Site Santa Fe Biennial in New Mexico (2010).
Solmi"s video have been screened in several film and video festivals around the world including the Kassel Documentary film and video festival. Tina B, Prague; Les Rencontres Internationales, Paris, Madrid, Berlin.
The London International animation festival.
Loop Barcelona and others Federico Solmi has given lectures on his work in several universities and art schools in the United States and Europe, including Yale University in New Haven, School Of Visual Arts in New York, and Accademia di Belle Arti Brera and Universita" Cattolica in Milan.