ARTISTI NELLO SPAZIO. Da Lucio Fontana a oggi: gli ambienti nell'arte italiana
from 20 October 2013 to 29 December 2013
Catanzaro
ARTISTI NELLO SPAZIO. Da Lucio Fontana a oggi: gli ambienti nell'arte italiana
Catanzaro City Council and the Rocco Guglielmo Foundation
present
ARTISTS IN SPACE
From Lucio Fontana to the present day: environments in Italian art
Catanzaro, San Giovanni Monumental Complex
curated by Marco Meneguzzo, Bruno Di Marino and Andrea La Porta
40 exhibition spaces for 40 leading artists.
An extraordinary opportunity to physically ‘enter’ the artwork.
The exhibition itinerary, staged in Catanzaro, features a series of reconstructed environments (from Gianni Colombo’s Spazio Elastico of 1967 to Davide Boriani’s Ambiente stroboscopico n. 5, also from 1967,
from Alberto Biasi’s Light Prism to Fabio Mauri’s Luna from 1968, right up to more recent works by Studio Azzurro, Massimo Bartolini, Flavio Favelli and Loris Cecchini), as well as a series of spaces documented through photographs – some by Claudio Abate – and videos.
A historical exhibition (beginning with Agostino Bonalumi, Gabriele Devecchi, Lucio Fontana, Enrico Castellani, Giuliano Mauri and Aldo Mondino, and continuing with Jannis Kounellis, Giulio Paolini and Luca Vitone) which, through a chronological sequence, succeeds in illustrating one of the most fascinating aspects of contemporary art.
The idea
The relationship with real space is one of the constants of contemporary art. At least since the post-war period, one of the aims of the most avant-garde artists has been to shift the perception of art from sight—from the viewer’s gaze—to the viewer’s entire body, thereby engaging all five senses. The simplest and most effective way to achieve this was to compel the viewer to physically ‘enter’ the work, transforming it from a surface or three-dimensional object into a navigable space, into a place.
Thus the ‘environments’ were born: the viewer is ‘inside’ the work in a physically verifiable way. The history of these environments in this sense almost coincides with the history of post-war art, but – once again – Italian art, which was a forerunner of these environments, failed to capitalise on this primacy, allowing other cultures – such as the Anglo-Saxon or French – to gain greater recognition. The exhibition Artisti nello Spazio aims to partially rectify this misinterpretation of global contemporary art, providing a chronological and highly spectacular overview of Italian environments, which are in no way inferior – both in terms of chronological precedence and conceptual complexity – to the better-known American or French examples.
The exhibition
In the San Giovanni Monumental Complex, which dedicates some twenty rooms to temporary exhibitions,
reconstructed the environments that have shaped the history of Italian art – in this field – from the post-war period to the present day. For various reasons (logistical, historical and economic), not all the environments can be reconstructed from scratch, just as not all of them still exist; some rooms can, so to speak, be ‘reconstructed’ through photographic evidence from the period, perhaps using large life-size prints. Visitors will thus find themselves entering and ‘experiencing’ a spectacular series of spaces that have marked the great eras of Italian art from 1949 – the year of Lucio Fontana’s Ambiente a Luce – to the very latest generations, passing through the legendary 1960s and 1970s, which represented one of the high points of Italian art on the international stage.
Artists featured in the exhibition: Claudio Abate, Vincenzo Agnetti, Mario Airò, Getulio Alviani, Giovanni Anceschi, Studio Azzurro, Massimo Bartolini, Manfredi Beninati, Cesare Berlingeri, Carlo Bernardini, Alberto Biasi, Agostino Bonalumi, Davide Boriani, Enrico Castellani, Alik Cavaliere, Loris Cecchini, Gianni Colombo, Gino De Dominicis, Gabriele Devecchi, Chiara Dynys, Luciano Fabro, Flavio Favelli, Lucio Fontana, Pinot Gallizio, Piero Gilardi, Jannis Kounellis, Ugo La Pietra, Fabio Mauri, Giuliano Mauri, Mario Merz, Aldo Mondino, Liliana Moro, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Luca Maria Patella, Alfredo Pirri, Paolo Scheggi, Paolo Scirpa, Nanda Vigo, Luca Vitone. They represent the continuity of Italian art in this field, and will be introduced by a tribute to Mimmo Rotella, for whom a setting will be created which, in keeping with his poetics, will serve as a kind of key to interpreting the entire exhibition: through the room/tribute to Rotella, the viewer will enter a ‘different’ space, an ‘other’ space, the timeless realm of art.
ARTISTI NELLO SPAZIO will be complemented by a series of fringe events (conferences and talks) hosted both in Catanzaro and in the municipalities of Soverato and Sant’Andrea Apostolo dello Ionio, partners in the project.
Opere correlate
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