Musée d'Art Moderne - Parigi
Everyday Mythologies 2
28 April – 5 June 1977
Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne
curated by Suzanne Pagé, Catherine Thieck and Laurence Bossé
Aldo Mondino exhibited at the show “Mythologies quotidiennes 2”, which opened in the spring of 1977 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, consolidating his presence within the vibrant Parisian art scene of that decade. Invited by curators Gérald Gassiot-Talabot and Jean-Louis Pradel to take part in the prestigious context of an exhibition designed to take stock of and examine the developments in Narrative Figuration and urban visual research, the Turin-based artist contributed to the group exhibition with a radically independent perspective, capable of transcending the conventions of pure political commentary or conventional Pop Art.
In an exhibition that documents the evolution of ‘everyday mythologies’ through the works of the major figures on the international scene, Mondino responds to the stimuli of the French metropolis with a formal approach dominated by a harsh, biting, almost engraving-like graphic style. It was during his Parisian period that his visual obsession with clichéd monuments and the city’s symbols was deconstructed through a systematic use of irony and cultured allusion, where the density of the backgrounds evokes the expressive drama of historical woodcuts.
His participation in the 1977 exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne marked a moment of great institutional significance during his stay in France. The Parisian exhibition attested to Mondino’s unique ability to reconsider the collective imagination and urban narrative not as a celebration of the everyday, but as a purely linguistic pretext, reaffirming that intellectual freedom and taste for conceptual short-circuiting that would characterise his entire mature output.
Mythologies quotidiennes 2