Velan's programme for 1998 begins with a solo show of New Yorker artist Dennis OPPENHEIM (Electric City, Washington, USA, 1938). About thirty the installlions presented in the rooms of the former Woolen Mill Bona in Carignano.

Dennis Oppenheim, American artist, attended the School of Arts and Crafts in California and the Stanford University. At the end of the Sixties he began to create a series of works inspired by ‘land art’ and later on he included also some premises of  ‘body art’ and of the ‘performance’. Despite his connection with environmental Art, his work presents a combative dimension, which distinguishes his works from the works of other artists such as Smithson or Heizer, more worried about romantic and epic aspects. His ethic and politic compromise stands out thanks to some of his actions, for instance when he surrounded a museum with guard dogs, obstructing thus the entrance, or like when he sew a yield conscious of the fact that it was destined to remain fruitless. By the end of the Seventies he worked on a series of sculptures and symbolic objects reflecting the cathartic power of art and its capacity to throw a bad light on it all. Among his solo exhibitions we remember the one at the Kunsthalle in Basel (1979) or the one at the Kunstbunker Tumulka, Munich (1995). He took part to the 5^th and 6^th editions of Documenta in Kassel. The Univers by Dennis Oppenheim. One of the greatest exponents of contemporary art in the second half of the twentieth century, who, together with  Bruce Nauman, Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Vito Acconci, Robert Morris e Gunther Uecker, gave life to that American area generation which so much contributed to the renewal of contemporary languages. He is a conceptual artist, popular thanks to his activity in the Land Art performance and video fields. In 1966 he moved to New York where he organized his first solo exhibition. Around the Eighties Oppenheim dedicated himself in particular to the creation of large installation works, very often in public locations. In 1997 he took part to the Biennale in Venice.