1960s, '70s art movements to star Sep 6-Nov 9
(ANSA)
- Rome, September 3 - A broad survey of the work of Conceptual
artists Sol LeWitt, Alighiero Boetti and Agostino Bonalumi will be
showcased at an exhibit opening on September 6 in the northern
Italian city of Pordenone. The show will wrap up on November 9. Art
movements from the 1960s and 1970s will star at the Sagittaria
Gallery of the city's Centro Iniziative Culturali with 140
lithographs and silk-screen prints by the three leading artists,
selected from the over 1,200 graphic artworks which are part of the
permanent collection of the Museo Casabianca in Malo, near Vicenza.
The show ''LeWitt Bonalumi Boetti. Edizioni di grafica del Museo
Casabianca di Malo'' also gives an interesting insight into the
history and activity of the museum which debuted in 1978, when art
collector Giobatta Meneguzzo decided to open his vast collection to
the public and the Morandi Bonacossi family offered their 18th
century home as location.
The
museum hosts one of Italy's most important collections of art from
the 1960s through the 1990s with over 1,200 works by 700 leading
artists including Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Enrico
Castellani, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Christo, Mario
Schifano, Jannis Kounellis, Giulio Paolini and Michelangelo
Pistoletto. Only about 200 works are on display at the museum while
the rest of the permanent collection is available for loans aimed at
divulging conceptual art and its emphasis on ideas - also through the
narrative of serial projects - over a physical product.
The
exhibit opening in Pordenone in particular showcases key productions
selected by Meneguzzo with 42 works by LeWitt, 16 by Bonalumi and 83
by Boetti. US artist Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) helped establish
Conceptualism and Minimalism as dominant movements of the post-war
era. His deceptively simple geometric sculptures and drawings, his
boldly coloured wall paintings and graphic art established him as a
leading modern American artist.
LeWitt
turned art into basic shapes - quadrilaterals, spheres and triangles
- a few colours - blue, black, yellow and red - and different types
of lines organized according to specific ideas and projects which
followed or defied logic. His mural-sized works sometimes took a
number of people to execute and the artist always granted his team
leeway in the belief that the input provided by others was part of
art, enabling people to participate in the creative process. The work
of Italian painter and sculptor Agostino Bonalumi (1935-2013), a
fixture of Milan's art scene from the 1950s, is represented by the
graphic edition Italian Diary 1970 and 16 silk-screen prints. This
gives an insight into the production of the artist known for his idea
of ''painting-objects'', three-dimensional works in-between canvases
and sculptures characterized by a minimalist aesthetic.
Another
Italian artist, Alighiero Boetti (1940-1994) - originally a member of
the group of Italian experimental artists gathered under the name
Arte Povera - is present with lithographs which are part of the
Insecure Nonchalant 1966-1975 anthology of works carried out during
that key decade for Italian and European art. Initially drawn to the
Arte Povera movement in the mid-1960s, Boetti later backed away
describing their work as too ''baroque'' and commercially ambitious.
The
artist, whose influences included Marcel Duchamp and industrial
culture, broke away from group work to focus on extensive travels
that would take him to East and Central Asia, Africa, Latin America
and the US, turning him into a prototype of the globetrotting artist.
His work vied to cut through cultural differences and pit order and
disorder against one another.
