September 24, 2026 – November 9, 2026

Opening: Thursday September 24, 2026 h. 18.00

108

GranTour

curated by Melania Andronic

Colombo’s Gallery is pleased to present GranTour, the new solo exhibition by 108, also marking ten years of collaboration between the artist and the gallery. The show brings together paintings, sculptures, installations and works on paper, documenting the latest evolution of his research.
The title makes reference to the formative journeys of the European tradition, widespread from the 17th to the 19th century. Rather than alluding to a preset geographical itinerary, GranTour suggests a process of ongoing transformation, in which every experience contributes to the growth of the artist’s language. The sojourns, work periods and movements that that have shaped recent years do not become the subject of the works: instead, they narrate interferences, influences and conditions in which an approach already in progress for over 25 years continues to expand.
The activity of 108 has always developed through direct interaction with places. Not because they become images for representation, but because they permeate his works as living material: a surface, a quality of light, a material, an architecture, a rhythm, the relationship with a space. Each context thus becomes a working condition, contributing to slowly modify the process through which the form is defined. More than stemming from a previously established project, it seems to surface by means of a series of concretions, through the encounter between gesture, material and place.
The typical forms of the output of 108 adhere to a surprising continuity. They do not represent landscapes, organisms or symbols, though they are able to suggest their presence. They are autonomous forms developed in line with their own logic, spanning painting, sculpture and installation while preserving a recognizable coherent identity. Their nature remains intentionally unresolved: lacking in any descriptive function, they require the gaze to observe slowly, almost in a state of contemplation. In their essential quality and continuing alternation between full and empty, presence and absence, they seem to elude representation but also
pure geometric abstraction, constructing a space of perception that does not illustrate a meaning, but makes it possible.
In GranTour material takes on an even more central role. Painting definitely continues to represent the core of the research, but in an increasingly open dialogue with volume and space. Color further expands a language built around black, which remains its support structure without totally taking over. At the same time, the material stops being a mere support: wood, stone, paper, paint, the roller or the brush, play an active role in the creative process.
The experiences of these years are not illustrated, but slowly absorbed. What remains is not the story of a place, but the traces left on the form by the interferences, by those materials and by that time.
In this outlook, GranTour reflects its deeper meaning: not in the journey as a destination, but in the path of research that continues to transform, without ever failing to embody its own identity.

108 (Guido Bisagni) was born in Alessandria (Italy) in 1978, and lives and works in Alessandria and Milan.
Long an exponent of the Italian urban art scene, 108 took a degree in Industrial Design at the Milan Polytechnic, and is considered one of the most important figures of abstract post-graffiti art on a national and European level. He entered the world of graffiti at the age of 13, through the culture of punk rock and skateboarding rather than the more common background of hip-hop. His pieces along the streets of Alessandria were initially based on a more traditional American style, with a number of experiments with the three-dimensional paths explored by Swiss and German artists, after which he came into contact with the most advanced Nordic styles.
In 1999, influenced by the passage beyond the widespread idea of graffiti developed across the Alps (André, Stak, Honet), he abandoned traditional lettering to focus on more distinctive and characteristic expressive formulas, as also emphasized by the shift to the pseudonym 108, a depersonalized name derived from a combination of interests in oriental philosophies and geometry. Signs, symbols and abstract materializations with organic characteristics form his new poetic and spiritual imaginary, whose conception intertwines contaminations from various sources: from the abstraction of the historical avant-gardes to the Dada randomness of H. Arp, from numerology to primitive painting.
The shamanic aspect of oriental religions and the color theory of Kandinsky represent fundamental factors with which to construct a discourse around these soft, ethereal and at the same time heavy forms, not so much in the direction of the aesthetic value – though it is constantly present – as in their universal intimacy. After an initial phase featuring the use of adhesive films in lively shades of yellow, the artist from Alessandria has found his own dimension in a total focus on black, seen as the main pathway towards deeper introspection. The use of paint, of rollers and locations extraneous to the urban context – walls of abandoned structures, partitions isolated in the natural landscape – are the results of this phase.
In more recent years we can observe a forceful return to color, always investigated in its inseparable symbolic role. The relationship with the surface and the sites of intervention – observed and explored as precise entities, and hence respected, never “occupied” – is also fundamental.
108 has shown work in many galleries and institutional spaces, in Italy and abroad. Since 2012, he has worked with Colombo’s Gallery.
At the 2025 edition of Urvanity Art Fair in Madrid, 108 won the Premio de Residencia at the Montresso Art Foundation.