press release

 IMAGINE. New Imagery in Italian Art 1960-1969
Curator: Luca Massimo Barbero
23 April – 19 September 2016
Peggy Guggenheim Collection
#ImaginePGC
From 23 April to 19 September 2016 the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents IMAGINE. New
Imagery in Italian Art 1960-1969, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero. A new interpretation of Italian
art in the 1960s: the birth of new imagery.
In Italy during the 1960s, at the height of the economic boom, artistic experimentation flourished at an
unprecedented pace and intensity. The goal was to create a new vocabulary of signs and images
capable of interpreting the vitality of contemporary culture and society. IMAGINE. New Imagery in
Italian Art 1960-1969 offers a fresh perspective on the richness of Italian art production in those years.
The theme, the leitmotif, of the exhibition is how the figured image, transient and transformed,
departing from the monochrome, served to construct a new language of representation in a little
known phase of Italian art history.
The exhibition, in a tightly curated sequence of galleries, lays out the multiple lines of research of a
number of Italian artists who, emerging from the zeroing of the neo-avant-garde, reconstituted a new
world of images, figures, and narrative. With no claim to definitiveness, IMAGINE. New Imagery in
Italian Art 1960-1969 sets out to supersede, from the vantage point of today, the so-called
‘orthodoxies’ of the time, freeing visual research from adherence to movements or subordination to
category. Acting like a short-circuit, the exhibition enriches established definitions and currents,
analyzing and evidencing through a high density sampling of works the re-emergence of the figure in a
radical and germinal way, whether in paint or photography. An intense sequence of emblematic works
captures the vitality of that brief period of time, a mere nine years, and uncovers, by diversity and
assonance, in an unceasing process of exchange and dialogue, that melting-pot of visual art, in a
process of ‘becoming’, which gave rise to the schools and movements of future avant-gardes.
The exhibition unfolds by contrasts and leaps, “stumbles caused by dissonances and revelations”
(Barbero). Each room distills an aspect of artistic research of the time. It opens with a section dedicated
to the erasing and obliteration of reality that came out of the effervescent cultural climate of Rome in
1960—the Filters and Metals of Lo Savio, the Monochromes of Schifano, the Screens of Mauri in
dialogue with Angeli’s powerful sfumato images of politics and heraldry. This is followed by the birth of
a new typology of image which, as if in reaction to international trends, looked to the past and above all
to the daily awareness of art in the collective consciousness of Italians. Works by Fioroni (Detail from
the Birth of Venus, 1965) and Festa (Nostalgia of the Infinite [Obelisk], 1963, La Grande Odalisque,
1964) transform the history of art into a new mythology. Two rooms of paintings by Schifano typify this
“metaphysics of the quotidian”, hinging on the black and white dazzle of his monumental Winter
Through the Museum (1965), together with some startling, little-known works such as I Do Not Love
Nature (1964), and Central Park East (1964), which deal with Schifano’s feelings about landscape at the
time of an intense sojourn in New York. In contrast and reaction to such lyrical images, one enters the
universe of Gnoli, with a room filled with his distinctive close-ups, such as Two Sleepers (1966) and
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White Bed (1968). A central position in the exhibition is taken by works in which the painter’s
intervention co-exists with photography, a medium increasingly pervasive in the avant-gardes of these
years. From this springs a component of ambiguity and interpretative liberty whereby the image stands
for imagination, thought, and metaphor for circumstances elsewhere. Cinema and mass media in the
work of Schifano and Rotella (Can I? 1963-65) clash with the profound and “classically modern”
conceptual imagery of Paolini (Poussin Pointing to the Old Masters as Fundamental Exemplar, 1968) or
with objects, implying performance and interaction, such as Pistoletto’s Globe (1966-1968). Image
becomes object, superceding mere representation: thus, in the remaining rooms, the works of Pascali
are suspended between play and a new contemporary bestiary, as ironic as it is theatrical (The
Beheading of the Rhinoceros, 1966). Pistoletto’s images of 1964, suspended in plexiglas (Electric Wire
Hung from the Wall [Plexiglas], Ladder leaning against a Wall [Plexiglas]) transport the visitor to a new
space colonized by art, questioning the relation of figure and object. These and the metaphorical
abundance of Kounnelis’s creations (White Rose, 1967) conclude this première investigation of the new
interpretative potential of the image.
An exhaustive catalogue, with several essays and studies, published by Marsilio Editori, Venice, in
separate English and Italian editions, provides historical context, establishing the autonomy and
difference of this evolution in Italian art with respect to American Pop Art.
On the occasion of the exhibition a cycle of films called If Arte Povera was Pop will be screened May
11 and May 12 at Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi, Venice. Presented for the first time at Tate Modern in
October 2015, If Arte Povera was Pop is a provocation. Arte Povera was everything but Pop. However,
the anthology has the purpose of investigating the origins and the transmission of what was
unquestionably an interdisciplinary movement. Free entry.
IMAGINE. New Imagery in Italian Art 1960-1969 is supported by Intrapresae Collezione
Guggenheim, by Private Bank BSI and by Regione del Veneto. The exhibition has been also made
possible thanks to the support of Christie's and Montblanc. In collaboration with Corriere della Sera,
Hangar Design Group designed the exhibition’s communication materials. The exhibition’s educational
programs are supported by the Fondazione Araldi Guinetti, Vaduz.
The exhibitions of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection are made possible thanks to the support of its Advisory Board and:
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TITLE
IMAGINE. New Imagery in Italian Art 1960-1969
VENUE AND DATE
Peggy Guggenheim Collection
April 23 – September 19, 2016
CURATOR
Luca Massimo Barbero, Associate Curator, Peggy Guggenheim Collection
WORKS
45
OVERVIEW
This fresh perspective on European post-war art looks at figuration in the
Italian avant-garde in the 1960s. The exhibition draws on the richness of
Italian art production in those years; its theme is how the figured image,
transient and transformed, departing from the monochrome, served to
construct a new language of representation in a little known phase of Italian
art history. On view are works by Franco Angeli, Mario Ceroli, Domenico
Gnoli, Giosetta Fioroni, Tano Festa, Fabio Mauri, Francesco lo Savio,
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Mario Schifano, Pino Pascali, Giulio Paolini, Jannis
Kounellis.
CATALOGUE
Published by Marsilio Editori, Venice, in separate English and Italian
editions. Price in the museum bookshops 35.00 €
ADMISSION TICKET TO THE
Regular euro 15; seniors euro 13 (over 65); students euro 9 (under 26 or with
a student ID card); children 0-10 yrs and members free entrance (further
information on membership: [email protected]).
Admission tickets allow the public to visit the temporary exhibition, the
permanent collection, the Hannelore B. and Rudolph B. Schulhof Collection
and the Nasher Sculpture Garden. Free guided tours of the temporary
exhibitions are daily at 3:30pm. Reservations are not required.
COLLECTION
HOURS
Daily from 10am to 6pm, closed on Tuesday and December 25
INFORMATION
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www.guggenheim-venice.it/peggyg.mobi
BOOKINGS AND GUIDED TOURS
tel. +39.041.2405440/419
EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITIES
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HOW TO ARRIVE
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Please, once published, send the article to: [email protected]
OFFICE
IMAGINE. New Imagery in Italian Art 1960-1969. The exhibition rooms.
INTRODUCTION
The dictionary definition in English of the verb “to imagine” is “to form a mental image of (something
not actually present to the senses).” This exhibition’s title, Imagine, proposes that the intention “to form
a mental image” was recurrent in the evolution of Italian art throughout the 1960s. The exhibition
sidesteps orthodoxies, liberates criticism from any belonging to movements or subordination to labels,
and presents, by means of a rich and highly selective sampling, the origins and development of new
kinds of figurative imagery in Italian art.
Each gallery offers a different aspect of artistic research by leading artists of those years. The first
section is titled “Matter and Screen,” dedicated to the obliteration or masking of reality, to art coming
from the effervescent cultural climate of Rome in 1960, in which Schifano, Mauri, and Lo Savio
confront the veiled images of Angeli. The birth of a new typology of the image follows: as if in reaction
to international trends, artists looked to art history, and primarily at its daily impact on the collective
Italian immaginario, generating a new ‘mythology,’ exemplified here in works by Fioroni, Festa, and
Ceroli. Two galleries are devoted to Schifano, with startling, little-known paintings revealing his
treatment of figure and landscape in response to the experience of his stay in New York. Next comes
Gnoli’s strange universe, with its clear-focused close-ups. Following this, and central to the exhibition’s
thesis, is the moment in which painting combined with images derived from photography, an ever
more pervasive medium in the avant-garde of those years: the world of cinema and the media in the
work of Rotella and Schifano clashes with the ‘classically modern’ conceptual art of Paolini and with the
‘minus objects’ (oggetti in meno) of Pistoletto, destined for interactive animation. The image turns into
object, superseding mere representation, and becomes ‘form of metaphor and forms of nature’ in the
art of Pascali, Pistoletto and Kounellis; that nature of artifice that vibrates in the Daisy of Fire at your
shoulders, a work which symbolically both opens and closes the circle of this narration of Italian art.
MATTER AND SCREEN
The Italian avantgarde of the early 1960s was characterized by experiments in the monochrome
‘zeroing’ of painting, rejecting the painterliness of Informel abstraction of the previous decade, and
parallel to the Milan art scene where Fontana and the artists of Azimut/h were active. Meanwhile,
Rome saw the birth of a new kind if imagery, which found its identity in the stratagems of the screen, of
layering and of veiling. The paradigm of obliteration and cancellation, between painted matter and the
screen, were the essence of the new image, which responded to the abundance of icon-laden visual
material pervasive in Rome, city of the predominance of the image.
Schifano’s painting at this time was exemplary. He wrote of his early monochromes: “At the start I
painted with few colors because in my work there was the idea of the emblematic, of street signs, of
perceptual phenomena, of primary things […] I was painting pictures thus: with blue, with red, with
yellow, with green. The first paintings were just yellow with nothing in them, empty images: […] they
went beyond and beside any cultural intention. They wanted just to be themselves.” Lo Savio’s works
paralleled this, in their idea of a construction of emptied out space, as neutral as it was incisive, cold but
never mechanical, that rebounded into a new geometry in Space Light (1960). The screen, as a space
where things can both appear and be hidden, co-existed in Mauri’s work with the fleeting image, as if in
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a movie projection. In the work of Angeli, the evocation of figures through a mist is like a metaphor of
the transience of things historical: the rhetoric of the outsize swastika, bleeding light and gold, and the
no less historical and ambivalent meaning-laden eagle and tiara of Achille Ratti, Pope Pius XI. The
somber specter of the image glows darkly from the painting, as does the dialectic of image/form and
narrative/history.
THE NEW MYTHOLOGY
The early 1960s saw the emergence in Italian art of a novel typology of the image, parallel to
international trends that drew on the visual material of mass consumer culture. Unlike British or
American Pop Art, this avantgarde looked back, to the history of images, and to the influence of art on
the imagery of Italian daily life, like a new icon-based mythology. The creative environment of the time
was the expression of a multifaceted and complex culture, with porous languages and techniques,
between painted and sculpted art on the one hand and the means of mass communication on the
other, engaging photography, rotogravure, cinema and television.
Nostalgia of the Infinite (Obelisk) by Festa (1963) exemplifies this co-existence: both a vivid reference
to reality (emphasized by the words “Piazza del Popolo,” in the upper part of the painting, in the font of
a street sign) and the metaphysical alienation of an emblematic object, isolated, artificial, hieratic. In his
Grande Odalisque (1964), the nude, derived from Ingres’ painting in the Louvre, is transposed into a
chilled, timeless suspension, both remnant of a body and cultural fetish.
Emblematic representations from the history of art, on the theme of beauty, were created by Fioroni:
her Detail of the Birth of Venus (1965), which iterates and overlaps a fragment of Botticelli’s Birth of
Venus in a sort of optical echo, induces a visual paradox of motion and stasis. Ceroli’s Study for Piper
(1965) relates to a sculpture inspired by the celebrated night club which opened in Rome that year,
swiftly becoming the symbolic locale for an entire generation: the projected photograph, transformed
into a figure, was another strategy for interfacing with reality.
A characteristic of the Italian context was the contamination of current affairs with the history of art, a
felicitous mix that estranged and filtered the present through the past, comforted by the ‘metaphysics’
of Giorgio de Chirico. We witness therefore, in the images of Festa, Fioroni, and Ceroli, a conceptual
cooling (with respect to the ‘heat’ of Informel abstraction of the 50s) which, rather than erasing the
past, thrived on motifs drawn from Italy’s cultural panorama, whether the face of Botticelli’s Venus, the
obelisk in Piazza del Popolo, or the verve of Roman nightlife.
MARIO SCHIFANO 1
Schifano was central to the process of the return to the image, progressing from the dimension of
prioritizing the paint surface to arrive at new kinds of figuration. Body in Motion and in Equilibrium
(1963) was a key work, in which paint becomes evocation and context: it manifests itself solely in
paint/color, and leaves the empty space to the sinews of the almost technical drawing, dismantling and
recomposing the body in both its movement and its balance. At the time of a rediscovery of Futurist
dynamism in the work of Balla (celebrated in 1963 in his first major retrospective in Italy, at the Galleria
Civica d’Arte Moderna in Turin), and while the world raced towards wholescale mechanization in the
media and in photography, Schifano instead celebrated the value of humanity, in paint, configured
entirely by drawing, a detail filling the whole pictorial field.
In Winter through the Museum (1965), painted as a recollection of his New York experience in the
previous years, the theme of landscape becomes the extensive and detailed representation of an
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interior, as if Schifano intentionally betrayed Futurist dynamism in an image of a moving figure, as
shadow and slow-motion. Dynamism, in the figure to the right, is implied not so much by the figure in
motion as by the optical movement of the two broken concentric circular patterns in black and white in
the upper left of the painting. For Schifano in these years painting took on the character of a cinema
screen, as if the canvas were laid out on a wall on which to project reality. The choices made for this
exhibition are based on dichotomies of black and white, mark and color: Schifano stages for us the
visible world, and the neutrality and irreproachable objectivity of his figurations render them
representations.
MARIO SCHIFANO 2
During his stay in New York, from December 1963 to the summer of 1964, Schifano renewed a
dialogue with the art scene in America that had begun with his participation in the exhibition “The New
Realists” at the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, in November 1962 and a solo exhibition at the Galerie
Ileana Sonnabend in Paris in April 1963. He found a studio in a former dance academy at 791
Broadway: an early 20th-century four-story building, where Jasper Johns and the poet Frank O’Hara
also lived. He was in Greenwich Village, heart of the new beat culture and a few blocks from Andy
Warhol’s factory, which opened in 1962. He became a close friend of O’Hara’s, and admired his urban
poetry; together they roamed the city and produced a portfolio of 18 Words and Drawings. Schifano
continued to pursue his own discourse, parallel and alternative to American Pop Art, responsive to the
‘pure present’ of American culture, but insistent nonetheless on a vision based on the vitality of the
collective memory of the image.
The cycle of Schifano’s ‘windows’, including Enter My Eye Before My Feeling (1965), represents a new
relation of interior to exterior, in which clouds and atmospheric conditions, their lines and shapes,
project themselves into the studio, where they are captured on canvas. Magically the studio transforms
into a sort of optical chamber.
Landscape, which dominated his production between 1963 and 1964, need not be perceived as a
rupture with respect to his earlier monochromes, but rather as an inventive evolution: the natural world
is evoked through fragments, as if broken down into its component parts and reassembled according
to a fresh vision. Landscape elements are extrapolated and inserted into a new context of a conceptual
kind, underlined by the presence of suggestive phrases such as “En plein air”. They are ‘anemic’
landscapes, devoid of apparent life, or rather of any element of mimesis or reproduction of the motif,
and which become therefore increasingly crowded with absence, laden with allusions and foreground
objects, creating a claustrophobic, obstructive, even impassable space. Schifano’s imagery seems to
exist in a state of metaphysical suspension, wedding structural clarity with a synthesis of grandiose
views.
IMAGE, PHOTOGRAPH, CURRENT AFFAIRS
The relation of the Italian pictorial image to the worlds of photography and the media in the 1960s
triggered a kind of linguistic short-circuit. Photography and the media—both the instruments and the
subjects of representation—are mixed and combined with the artifice of the reality that is recreated and
‘expanded’ by the image.
Rotella’s réportages were his first experiments with photo-mechanical processes. Begun in 1963, these
consist of transferred photographic images, or images generated by the projection of other images on
emulsioned canvases (sometimes in black and white, and sometimes with color tones). Rotella posed
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the question of dealing critically and creatively with a new mass aesthetic: he appropriated images of
modern life, such as Yalta (1963), or revisited social myths, such as that of the automobile in Can I?
(1963-65).
A Landscape Dedicated to Jean-Luc Godard (1967) is derived from the still of a movie. In a ‘revisitation’
of the universe of visual things, Schifano reinvented images as catalysts of their latent energies,
rendering them with all their free and fantastic identity. He affirmed thus the transcendency of the
artist’s creativity over other media.
Regarding the relationship of meaning between photography and the image, as a reflection on art’s
truths over time, Paolini’s conceptual research took on a central position. He was not concerned with
photomechanical means as a way of lifting from the media an image that could be replicated: he was
interested instead in the photographed image in its relation to the concepts of time and the means of
artistic representation. He asserted: “Each of my works, by extension … [is] a photograph: it implies a
photographic optic, even when materially it is not (in the sense that photography is an act, a distance,
or even a withdrawal): it tends, that’s to say, to illustrate the eternalized moment of the image. Thus, it
is from the experience of photography that the meaning of drawing is acquired, for that which is drawn
to be true and thus, for ever, intact.”
In Pistoletto’s Globe (1966-68), newspapers are literaly enrolled, as purveyors of daily news, and
wrapped in such as way as to represent the form and movement of the world, creating a new urban
mythology, connoted by rolling, in a performatve spirit that at the end of the decade he would be used
to interpret the city as theater.
THE FORM OF THE METAPHOR, THE FORMS OF NATURE
The use of the image as a conceptual, artificial metaphor was one of the directions in which visual art
moved in the 1960s, especially in the second half of the decade. The object became the vehicle of an
idea. Pascali did this in his depictions of weapons, bundled together so as to turn violence into
playthings, which were shown as a series at the Galleria Sperone in Turin in January 1966. Similarly,
metaphorical values gather around Pistoletto’s Wood Sculpture thanks to the introduction of the
plexiglas barrier, at once container, gratuitous chromo-luminous object, and machine for perception,
which re-presents a relic come down to us over time, carved and shaped in its day, and formerly an
object of veneration (the Madonna).
In the following room, the Plexiglases by Pistoletto, on which motifs from the real are reproduced,
introduce the mirror as a locus of meaning into the lived space, the image of ‘contemporaneity’ in its
relation to the viewer, rendering each both object and concept. Pascali’s animals, such as the Beheading
of the Rhinoceros of 1966 (made of canvas stretched over a curved wood frame and exhibited for the
first time at the Galleria L’Attico in October the same year), which are fragments and disjointed,
detached body parts, populate an imagined ‘land of marvels’. They are the expression of an earnest
playfulness and an unchecked fantasy countering the morbidity that marked the generation of artists
that emerged from World War II, like a declaration of liberty to imagine a different world of daily
things: an Italian, Mediterranean world, profane and magic, nourished by the lightness of television,
scalloped in shape, weightless, living an ephemeral innocence, as does Pistoletto’s Burnt Rose.
Assonance and antithesis with respect to such forms of nature are the roses of Kounellis: the expression
of the need to put a stop to gesture or narrative in the matter of making art, to set in motion, through
the mechanism of the image conjured before one, a form of alienation. In their looming and somber
presence, the rose-images become merchanisms of thought. Frozen in time, they populate a world of
myth, artifices of nature, like the paradox of Kounellis’s Daisy of Fire, that opens this exhibition.
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If Arte Povera was Pop
On the occasion of the exhibition Imagine. New Imagery in Italian Art 1960-1969, curated by Luca
Massimo Barbero, at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, from April 23 to September 19 2016,
a cycle of films called If Arte Povera was Pop will be screened May 11 and May 12 at Teatrino di
Palazzo Grassi, Venice. Presented for the first time at Tate Modern in October 2015, the cycle is
curated by Andrea Lissoni (Tate Modern), Annamaria Licciardello (Centro Sperimentale di
Cinematografia-Cineteca Nazionale) and Sergio Toffetti (Director Archivio Nazionale Cinema
d’Impresa - CSC). The cycle is included in the educational programs of the museum and supported by
the Fondazione Araldi Guinetti, Vaduz. A special thanks to Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino,
Cittàdellarte - Fondazione Pistoletto and to Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi for the hospitality.
If Arte Povera was Pop is a provocation. Arte Povera was everything but Pop. However, the anthology
has the objective to investigate the origins and the transmission of what was unquestionably an
interdisciplinary movement. Alongside rare artists’ films, documentation of seminal exhibitions, and
audacious avant-garde films, If Arte Povera was Pop explores both the heterodox environment of Arte
Povera in Turin and the cosmopolitanism and eccentricity of the Roman scene.
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3
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catalogues
Marsilio
edited by Luca Massimo Barbero
size 23 x 28, bilingual italian and english
flexi bound
pp. 288 with 319 col. and b&w ill.
price 40.00 € in bookshop; 35.00 € at exhibition
The dictionary definition in English of the verb “to imagine” is “to form a mental image of (something not
actually present to the senses).” This exhibition’s title, Imagine, proposes that the intention “to form a mental
image” was recurrent in the evolution of Italian art throughout the 1960s. The exhibition sidesteps orthodoxies,
liberates criticism from any belonging to movements or subordination to labels, and presents, by means of a rich
and highly selective sampling, the origins and development of new kinds of figurative imagery in Italian art. [...]
luca massimo barbero
The 1960s in Italy saw the flourishing of brand new artistic experimentations, which in turn generated a
vocabulary of signs and images, reflecting the dynamism of Italy’s society and its turmoil in the midst of the
economic boom. The theme of the image becomes therefore the common denominator of the expository
itinerary of the exhibition “Imagine. New images in Italian art 1960-1969”, that twists and turns through
original views and perspectives. A path that analyses the birth of a new language, symbolic of this rarely
scrutinized and very little known period of Italian art.
This volume is dedicated to this decade’s incredible amount of works and proposals, including a number of
studies, essays, discussions and researches aimed at portraying the growth, the autonomy and the evolution
of what is an entirely Italian phenomenon, compared with American pop consciousness.
Through a rich iconographic setup made up of more than 300 illustrations, the outcome of a long and
exhaustive research, the works on exhibition (by artists such as Franco Angeli, Mario Ceroli, Domenico
Gnoli, Giosetta Fioroni, Tano Festa, Jannis Kounellis, Fabio Mauri, Francesco lo Savio, Giulio Paolini, Pino
Pascali, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Mario Schifano) are confronted by the visual collective imagination of
those years in a dialogue rich in suggestions and ideas.
contents of the book
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press office
Chiara De Stefani
Marsilio Editori s.p.a.
tel. 041-240 6512
cell. 331- 62 02922
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Luca Massimo Barbero Matter and Screen
Francesca Pola A New Mythology
Luca Massimo Barbero Mario Schifano: images between memory and future
Walter Guadagnini Of Metaphysics and other Wonders. The world of Domenico Gnoli
Francesca Pola The Mediated Image
Luca Massimo Barbero The Form of the Metaphor and the Forms of Nature