GATE 44 produced the photo-etching series “This place is really nowhere” –  for Marco Strappato’s exhibition Etica, Tecnica e Pathos. In this body of work, the artist transforms familiar digital landscapes—originally circulated as smartphone wallpapers—into new visual territories. Through a meticulous process of image decomposition and photomechanical translation, each print sheds its recognisable source and emerges as an evocative fragment: an imagined horizon, a lunar terrain, or a mental geography suspended between memory and invention.

By shifting mass-produced stock imagery into the artisanal realm of printmaking, Strappato examines how contemporary landscapes are created, consumed, and mythologised. The resulting photo-etchings blur the boundaries between the artificial and the natural, prompting viewers to reconsider what an image can hold and how new meaning can surface through transformation, technique, and erosion.

This place is really nowhere
photopolymer etching on Laurier paper 300 mg, aluminium frame
20 x 34,5
2022
Price: 1500 (each – no frame)