Sensoria Art Edition

Art at Sensoria becomes experience. An Art Dinner with added inspiration. Cuisine meets art, artists meet guests, and conversations meet new perspectives.

During selected evenings, artistic practice enters into dialogue with culinary expression. Artists are present, conversations unfold, and guests experience the work in an intimate and sensory setting. A central element of these evenings is the interplay between food and artistic installation. Inspired by the philosophy of Ikebana, food and floral compositions are conceived as one — creating a subtle dialogue between nature, form and perception. These evenings go beyond a traditional dinner. They create immersive moments where art, gastronomy and atmosphere merge into a shared experience.

The Sensoria Art Residency emerged from a central question: How can art become more immediate, more accessible and more alive within a place?
At its core lies the idea of connection. Creating a setting where artists and guests meet naturally, where exchange happens without distance, and where moments are shared rather than staged. The residency invites selected contemporary artists to live and work at Sensoria for a defined period. During their stay, artistic process becomes visible — not as a finished result, but as something unfolding over time. Guests are invited into this process through open studio moments, conversations and shared formats. What emerges is not only an understanding of the work, but a connection to the artist behind it.

Soichiro Kanai is a Japanese contemporary artist whose work explores the relationship between time, material and space. Born in 1999 and based in Tokyo, his artistic path emerged through a deeply personal transformation. After an intensive period as a competitive tennis player which ultimately came to an abrupt end, he returned to drawing as a way of reconnecting with himself. This moment continues to shape his practice today. 

Working with beeswax, sumi ink, aged wood and soil, Kanai develops surfaces through repetitive gestures such as applying, pouring and layering. These processes are not directed towards perfection but towards an ongoing dialogue with the material itself. What defines his work is a quiet attentiveness. Through the repetition of touching, pausing and allowing, tension and stillness become embedded within the surface. Order does not arise from control but from a temporary balance that emerges where the behavior of the material meets the rhythm of the body.

His practice is deeply concerned with time, not as a linear concept but as something that accumulates, transforms and leaves traces. By working with organic and evolving materials, Kanai allows processes such as aging, erosion and change to become part of the work itself. In this way, his pieces move between opposites such as nature and human intervention, permanence and transience, presence and disappearance. They invite the viewer to reflect on the subtle boundaries between time, memory and space.

Recent exhibitions include Dialogue of Silence and Time (Seizan Gallery Tokyo, 2025), Upstairs (Moosey, UK, 2024), and Ooi (Crowd) (DDDART, 2023).

Caroline Comploi is a contemporary artist whose work unfolds at the intersection of landscape, memory and perception.

Born in 1999 in South Tyrol and raised in Val Gardena, her practice is closely connected to the Dolomites. It reflects a deep sensitivity towards nature, not as a backdrop, but as a living and interconnected system. Working primarily with oil paint and drawing, Comploi creates compositions that move between abstraction and landscape. Her works often evoke shifting terrains, where forms dissolve into one another and boundaries remain intentionally open. Rather than depicting nature, she approaches it as something to be felt and translated. Light, movement and subtle transformation become central elements, allowing her paintings to capture fleeting states rather than fixed images.

Her artistic language is shaped by her Ladin cultural background as well as a broader reflection on ways of seeing in which humans, animals and environment are understood as part of a continuous whole. This perspective lends her work a quiet depth. It moves between observation and intuition, between outer landscape and inner image. In her paintings, time is not linear. Surfaces seem to emerge, shift and settle, inviting the viewer to slow down and engage more attentively with what unfolds. She studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, where she completed both her bachelor and master degrees, further refining her visual language within a contemporary context.

Caroline Comploi lives and works in Val Gardena, where her practice continues to evolve in close dialogue with landscape, material and place.

Art at Sensoria can also be experienced directly. Through a series of curated formats, guests are invited to explore their own creative expression — guided by artists, materials and traditional techniques. These experiences include atelier visits, artist for a day, drawing sessions, pottery classes and craft based formats such as wreath binding, as well as Suminagashi, the Japanese art of marbling. Each format is an invitation to slow down, to engage with material, and to reconnect with the act of making. It is not about learning, but about experiencing.

The Sensoria Art Christmas Charity extends the artistic dialogue into the winter season. In an intimate and carefully curated setting, selected artists present a work that is auctioned as part of a shared evening. The artist defines the starting price, which is fully attributed to them. Any additional proceeds are dedicated to a charitable cause. In this way, the initiative connects artistic creation with social responsibility — transforming the act of collecting into an act of giving. Set within the quiet atmosphere of the festive season, the evening becomes more than an auction.
It becomes a moment of connection between art, people and purpose.

Aron Demetz (born in 1972 in Sterzing, South Tyrol) is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary sculpture. Now at home in Ortisei in Val Gardena/Gröden, he draws on a profound knowledge of traditional woodcarving while embracing an experimental approach to material and form. Following his training at the art school in Selva, he studied sculpture under Professor Christian Höpfner at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg.

Demetz is not concerned with form alone, but also with transformation – in both physical and conceptual terms. His figures become vessels for exploring questions of vulnerability, time, and the human impact on natural processes. His works bring organic materials such as wood into dialogue with resin, plaster, or bronze, shaped in turn by burning, oxidation, or fungal growth – natural processes that Demetz chooses not to control, but to guide. In this way, the creative process itself becomes part of the work’s essence.

His international breakthrough came in 2009 with his participation in the 53rd Venice Biennale. Today, his sculptures can be found in renowned museums and collections, such as the Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, the Museo Omero in Ancona, and the Beelden aan Zee in The Hague. Alongside his artistic work, he was formerly a professor of sculpture at the academies in Carrara and Venice and has been the director of the Summeracademy Gardena in Ortisei since 2018.

Peter Senoner (born in 1970 in Bolzano, South Tyrol) has developed artistic expression in the place where the body, technology, and digital imagination intersect. Now based in Klausen, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich under Professor Asta Gröting. Numerous international studio residencies – including in New York, Tokyo, Vienna, Berlin, and Detroit – have shaped his global outlook and aesthetic language.

Senoner creates sculptures and drawings that explore post-human corporealities. His hybrid figures – part human, part machine, part beings from an as-yet-unknown cosmos – pose questions about identity, gender, reproduction, and memory, combining traditional materials such as wood and bronze with digital techniques like 3D scanning and CNC milling. The resulting forms are both alien and familiar – unsettling, captivating, and intellectually provocative.

Exhibitions in institutions such as the Kunsthalle in Vienna, the Tyrolean State Museum Ferdinandeum, the Lentos Art Museum in Linz, and the Haus der Kunst in Munich attest to the relevance of his work. As an educator, he has worked at universities in Tokyo, Innsbruck, Rosenheim, and Bolzano, where he continues to shape the discourse on the future of the body and spatial experience.