Suresh Prandi @ Maroncelli 12 Gallery, Milan - "Spirit and Spectres in Suresh's colour​​" Exhibition

Spirit and Spectres in Suresh's colour​​

Maroncelli 12 Gallery, Milan

Through September 26, 2025

Maroncelli 12 gallery presents the Suresh Prandi’s debut on the art scene and the power of his painting. “Spirito e spettri nel colore di Suresh / Spirit and Spectres in Suresh’s colour” is curated by art historian Bianca Tosatti. This is the first ever exhibition of this young artist. 

The exhibition will continue at the Gliacrobati gallery in Turin, in June-July 2026. 

Suresh Prandi’s works move emotions: the artist’s vision breaks the canonical scheme of perspective, in a dense carpet of pasty chromatic fields, supported by black strokes that allude to forms of human features. Suresh Prandi’s creative process is born from a meditative state during which the lines become tangled on a chromatic base stratified on many levels: in fact, as in the gymnastics that the artist systematically practices, spiritual understanding cannot be seen unless one learns the right techniques. And in this mass of matter, the eye emerges - more eyes - that attract the viewer and like magnets suck him into "lakes" of color. 

"And at once I find the eye that is looking back at me: extraordinarily large, fixed and enquiring - writes Bianca Tosatti in the critical text in the catalog -; a vortex sucking me inward, amplifying the tremors of my mental terrain; an outward explosion of my existence whose forms it shakes. And so the work becomes a subject-gaze situated in the field of the Other, because it is the image that looks at the subject".

Suresh Prandi was born on June 9, 1998 in Bangalore (India), where he spent his early years with his parents. At the age of eight he was adopted by the Prandi family and moved to Campogalliano, a small village in the province of Modena, where he still lives. He regularly attended elementary, middle and high school, graduating from the professional institute of Correggio (Reggio Emilia) in “Services for Agriculture and Rural Development”. Thanks to his idol, Cristiano Ronaldo, Suresh Prandi first became passionate about football and then about gymnastics, developing a true cult for the body, around which all his days now revolve. In 2018 Suresh Prandi began his placement at the day center of the Nazareno cooperative in Carpi, in the province of Modena (an association for the reception, care and rehabilitation of people with disabilities), where he began to express himself through drawing. Noticing his natural talent and the benefits he derives from it in terms of relationships and personal well-being, in 2024 it was decided to permanently include him in Manolibera painting atelier, where he works every day. 

The artist often uses oil pastels to create a chromatic mosaic that almost entirely covers the previously created drawing; he is a master in the combination of color that never fades into the next shade but it is placed next to it as if the hues and combinations were innate. And speaking of “Landscape with Angel”, Bianca Tosatti writes: “The colour is approached in a circumspect and yet ambitious way; weighed and divided like the cones of pigment on an Indian market stall, arranged by a wise seller so that the emotional value of each one can be perceived”. 

MARONCELLI 12 GALLERY

Via Maroncelli, 12 – Milan

maroncelli12.it

Spirit and Spectres in Suresh's colour​​

Maroncelli 12 Gallery, Milan, May 28 – September 26, 2025

Typologien: Photography in 20th-Century Germany @ Fondazione Prada, Milan - Exhibition Curated by Suzanne Pfeffer

Typologien

Photography in 20th-Century Germany

Fondazione Prada, Milan

Through 14 July 2025

Fondazione Prada presents “Typologien,” an extensive study dedicated to 20th-century German photography, at its Milan venue. The exhibition, hosted within Podium, the central building of the Milan headquarters, is curated by Susanne Pfeffer, art historian and director of the MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST, Frankfurt.

The exhibition attempts to apply the principle of “typology,” which originated in 17th- and 18th-century botany to categorize and study plants, and appeared in photography in the early 1900s, affirming itself in Germany throughout the 20th century. Paradoxically, the given formal principle allows for unexpected convergences of German artists spanning different generations and the manifestation of their individual approaches.

The exhibition path follows a typological rather than a chronological order, bringing together more than 600 photographic works by 25 established and lesser-known artists essential for recounting a century of German photography, including Bernd and Hilla Becher, Sibylle Bergemann, Karl Blossfeldt, Ursula Böhmer, Christian Borchert, Margit Emmrich, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Isa Genzken, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Lotte Jacobi, Jochen Lempert, Simone Nieweg, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Heinrich Riebesehl, Thomas Ruff, August Sander, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Thomas Struth, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rosemarie Trockel, Umbo (Otto Umbehr), and Marianne Wex. A system of suspended walls creates geometric partitions in the exhibition space, forming unexpected connections between artistic practices that differ from each other, but are united by a common principle or intention of classification.

As stated by Susanne Pfeffer, “Only through juxtaposition and direct comparison is it possible to find out what is individual and what is universal, what is normative or real. Differences are evidence of the abundance of nature and the imagination of humans: the fern, the cow, the human being, the ear; the bus stop, the water tower, the stereo system, the museum. The typological comparison allows differences and similarities to emerge and the specifics to be grasped. Unknown or previously unperceived things about nature, the animal, or the object, about place and time become visible and recognizable.”

In photography, employing typologies means affirming an equivalence between images and the absence of hierarchies in terms of represented subjects, motifs, genres, and sources. Despite this, typology remains a highly challenging and complex notion. It operates in a paradoxical regime: on the one hand, this approach can lead to a systematic recording of people and objects based on extreme objectivity; on the other hand, typology corresponds to an individual and arbitrary choice, revealing itself as a disturbing and potentially subversive act.

The hypothesis that photography plays a key role not only in fixing distinctive phenomena but also in organizing and classifying a plurality of visible manifestations remains a vital force in today’s artistic efforts to navigate the complexity of our social and cultural realities. With the spread of digital imagery and practices, the concept of typology continues to be questioned and re-defined by contemporary photographers and artists.

As underlined by Susanne Pfeffer, “The unique, the individual, seems to have been absorbed into a global mass, the universality of things is omnipresent. The Internet allows typologies to be created in a matter of seconds. And yet this is precisely when it seems important—to artists—to take a closer look.” As further explained by Pfeffer, “When the present seems to have abandoned the future, we need to observe the past more closely. When everything seems to be shouting at you and becoming increasingly brutal, it is important to take a quiet pause and use the silence to see and think clearly. When differences are not seen as something other, but turned into something that divides us, it is crucial to notice what we have in common. Typologies allow us to identify remarkable similarities and subtle differences.”

In the early 20th century, Karl Blossfeldt (1865–1932) was one of the first artists to transfer the classification system used in botanical studies to photography. His vast and detailed plant atlas represented a foundational moment for German Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). This artistic and photographic movement emerged in the 1920s during the Weimar Republic and promoted the importance of categories and distinctions and the remarkable ability of photography as a medium to explore the very idea of typology.

Another pioneering figure was August Sander (1876–1964), who published his photo book Antlitz der Zeit (Face of Our Time) in 1929, at the time excerpted from his landmark project Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts (People of the 20th Century). Described by Walter Benjamin as a “training atlas” of physiognomic perception, Antlitz der Zeit was an ambitious attempt to portray the diversity and the structure of German society using class, gender, age, occupation, and social background as distinct categories of a rigid and neutral classification system. 

Both Karl Blossfeldt’s and August Sander’s typologies were fundamental for Bernd Becher (1931–2007) and Hilla Becher (1934–2015) when, at the end of the fifties, they began an enormous and lifelong documentation and preservation project of industrial architecture. In 1971, they described the “industrial constructions” as “objects, not motifs”. They stated that “the information we want to provide is only created through the sequence, through the juxtaposition of similar or different objects with the same function”. Their black-and-white monuments, or “anonymous sculptures”, isolated against a monochromatic sky, centered, framed in the same format and arranged in a block, became an essential reference for American and European Post-Minimalist and Conceptual artists. They also represented a rich heritage for younger generations of German artists and photographers, such as Andreas Gursky (b. 1955), Candida Höfer (b. 1944), Simone Nieweg (b. 1962), Thomas Ruff (b. 1958) and Thomas Struth (b. 1954), who studied at the Academy in Düsseldorf in the class led by Bernd and Hilla Becher from 1976.

Hans-Peter Feldmann (1941–2023), internationally recognised for his fundamental contribution to conceptual art, traced a complementary trajectory in German photography. In his works, he documented everyday objects and historical events and combined deadpan humor with a systematic approach to accumulating, cataloguing, and rearranging elements of contemporary visual culture. In his series, he invented personal yet very political typologies and adopted a deliberate snapshot approach with a commercial aesthetic. For his work Alle Kleider einer Frau (All the Clothes of a Woman, 1975), he took 35mm-format photographs of underwear, hosiery, T-shirts, dresses, trousers, skirts, socks, and shoes, all hanging on hangers on the wall or laid on dark fabric. With his project Die Toten 1967–1993 (The Dead 1967–1993, 1996–98), he paid homage to individuals murdered in the context of the political and terroristic movements in Post-War Germany. As pointed out by Susanne Pfeffer, “With his typologies, he emphasized the equal value of all photographs, their image sources and motifs, and underscored the de-hierarchization inherent in every typology.”

In his apparently random collection of found, personal or pornographic images, press clippings, and historical photos of Nazi concentration camps, the Red Army Faction and German reunification, a “private album” named Atlas (1962 – present), Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) seemed to deny or challenge the very idea of typology. Instead, he took the principle of equivalence between images and their trivialization process to the limits, creating a jarring contrast and an acute awareness of a repressed collective memory.

In the seventies and eighties, in a dialectic relationship with the artistic lessons of the Bechers, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff, and Thomas Struth progressively abandoned the radicalism and black-and-white purism of their professors. They explored the colorful dominance of banality in their series of individual or family portraits, monumental and detailed city views, and spectacular documentation of cultural or tourist sites, generating a plethora of contemporary and conflicting typologies.

In the late seventies and early eighties, multimedia artist Isa Genzken (b. 1948) engaged in a direct dialogue with the photographic medium. In 1979, she created a series entitled Hi-Fi that featured advertisements of avant-garde Japanese stereo equipment, organizing them in an imaginary commercial catalog. The second series entitled Ohr (Ear) (1980) depicted, in large-scale color close-ups, the ears of random women Genzken photographed on the streets of New York City. She transferred the traditional portrait genre to physiognomic detail and ironically investigating the absolute singularity and infinite individual differentiation the photographic portrait can record.

Typologien

Photography in 20th-Century Germany

Image courtesy of the Fondazione Pada

An illustrated book, published by Fondazione Prada and designed by Zak Group, accompanies the exhibition “Typologien: Photography in 20th-Century Germany”. It includes an introduction by Miuccia Prada, President and Director of Fondazione Prada, a text by the exhibition curator Susanne Pfeffer and three essays by renowned international art historians and curators Benjamin Buchloh, Tom Holert, and Renée Mussai.

FONDAZIONE PRADA, MILAN

Largo Isarco 2, 20139 Milano

www.fondazioneprada.org

Typologien: Photography in 20th-Century Germany @ Fondazione Prada, Milan, 3 April - 14 July 2025

Terry Atkinson @ Galleria Six, Milan

Terry Atkinson

Galleria Six, Milan

12 April - 14 June 2025

TERRY ATKINSON

FRONTISPIECE

© Terry  Atkinson

Courtesy of Galleria Six, Milan

Galleria Six presents a solo exhibition by TERRY ATKINSON.

For his third exhibition at Galleria Six, a new cycle of works entitled FRONTISPIECE is presented and exhibited together with Terry Atkinson's works from the late 1970s and 1980s. A dialogue between a present and a past that comes alive again.

The initial elements of the new series of works, which is still ongoing, are two books. The first is From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics by Quentin Skinner, published in 2018. The second is Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, published in 1964. 

These two stimuli are quickly followed by a third, triggered by the fact that Terry Atkinson introduced a portrait of himself from 1964 as a recurring motif in some of the works in the series. 

"The works are a mix of certain what I consider to be relevant words and images relevant to the task in hand. The words are frontispiece, portal, threshold, hubris, and maybe some others to come as the series move on. The images , thus far, are photocopies of my two daughters when they were young on a visit to German concentration camp at Natzwiller-Struthof  in the Vosges, images from Goya, a portrait of myself, Hobbes’ frontispiece for Leviathan, and a number of other images.

I attempt to construct the works not least through resonating the words inscribed on the tableaux  - Portal, something you see through or view from; Threshold, something you cross; Hubris – in this case an attempt to maneouvre the concept of the artist as an extreme self-assured projection, the model of the artist as a self-confirming centre of truth.  And so on …"

Terry Atkinson April 2nd, 2025

TERRY ATKINSON (1939, Thurnscoe, UK). Lives and works in Leamington Spa. An English visual artist and theorist, in his long career he has challenged the traditional conception of aesthetics in art, criticising the conventions of artistic production and fruition. 

‘If the work I have made over the last 40 years,’ says Terry Atkinson, ’has one characteristic that runs through it, it is a concern to make a critique of art rather than a celebration of it.

After studying at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, he emigrated to New York in 1967 where he met minimalist, conceptual and land artists such as Sol LeWitt, Dan Graham, Carl Andre and Robert Smithson. In 1968 he founded the conceptual collective Art & Language together with Michael Baldwin, Harold Hurrell and David Bainbridge, together they exhibited at documenta 5 (1972) curated by Harald Szeemann. He left the group in 1974 to pursue a solo career. He exhibited in 1984 at the 41st Venice Art Biennale. In 1985 he was a finalist for the Turner Prize. 

GALLERIA SIX 

Piazzale Gabrio Piola, 5 - 20131 Milano 

www.galleriasix.it

Artist Hako Hankson @ Primo Marella Gallery, Milan - "The Urgency of Thought" Exhibition

Hako Hankson

The Urgency of Thought

Primo Marella Gallery, Milan

25 April - 11 June 2024

Born in 1968 in Bafang, Cameroon, HAKO HANKSON now lives and works in Douala. A self-taught artist, whose real name is Gaston Hako, with a diploma in car mechanics, was promised a completely different future. However, he chose painting and the elements that forged his youth. 

Hako Hankson’s approach is to help and learn from his peers, it’s a true ode to the past and myths of ancient African civilizations. The artist transcribes, with legitimacy, the history of ancestral rites by giving them a contemporary resonance

 

Hako  Hankson  grew up under the influence of the art and culture of the sources of his country. His father was a notable person in Cameroon and also a sculptor and musician of the Royal Palace. Hako was therefore brought up surrounded by objects of initiation rites: masks, statuettes, totems etc. 

Hako Hankson has created a reception centre and a place of residence for visual artists facing difficulties, this structure, called “In and off art center”, was inaugurated in 2013 by his own means.

Hako Hankson's works possess an essential recognisability, the use of masks, tribal figures, the careful choice of colours and the abundance of details and decorations make his works a concentration of Africa. They are distinct and carefully delineated elements that narrate, through expressions and compositions, the cultural history of this continent. 

The use of masks stems from a profound philosophy of life, practised and recognised by Hako Hankson, handed down to him by his father: animism.

"My father, for his part, drew me into animist beliefs: for example, by using masks and statuettes in a dialogue with the afterlife, and that's how I came to understand the power of masks, what they could carry as a spirit, a soul, something subtle that we can't control".

His works have an intrinsic narrativity, in fact, although the viewer sees well-defined elements, plots and fantasies develop on the canvas enriching the aesthetic beauty of the masks. One often comes across human figures, convivial scenes depicted as if they were small visions within the works themselves. This indicates a link that Hako Hankson has always wanted to express: animism uses elements, such as masks, to converse with the afterlife and thus take on a spiritual, as well as an earthly character, acting as a bridge between soul and body. 

In the artist's canvases there appear flashes of humanity, encounters, human figures in their own right, or other elements, even animals, which always strictly maintain an almost rupestrian line of representation.

In fact, Hako Hankson's works also turn their attention to the past, underlying which is an important creative study of ancient African graphic descriptions. Not far removed from what are, for us, rupestrian paintings. In this way, the artist expresses a strong attachment to his own land, communicating it to Africans, showing their shortcomings and problems, almost in a codified language that, only thanks to a strong globalisation, becomes familiar to us too, reminding us of American or European artists who, appropriating a very similar imagery, revolutionised western aesthetics. In his works, the artist describes what has always surrounded him, through a universal language that is as clear as it is intricate.

He goes back to his origins, narrating different situations and characters, as humanity once did, but he evolves his language, enriches it and complicates it to make it futuristic. So as to attract the interest of the viewer, who loses himself in the immensity of the details.

Hako Hankson's painting addresses his homeland, but at the same time he wants to export what he sees as contemporary Africa to the world, narrating it through elements of what Africa once was, while maintaining its tribal nature. It is a message of hope, a new language that can lead the African continent to a better future.

PRIMO MARELLA GALLERY

Via Valtelina 31 - 20159 Milano

www.primomarellagallery.com

Gianluca Codeghini Exhibition @ Galleria Six, Milan - "Baciare, toccare e urlare a distanza"

Gianluca Codeghini

Baciare, toccare e urlare a distanza

Galleria Six, Milan

March 23 - Mai 4, 2024

GIANLUCA CODEGHINI

The aftershave victory, diptych, 2023

Ceramic and pongo sculpture, photo print

In this third solo exhibition at Galleria Six, GIANLUCA CODEGHINI reduces all his conceptual and formal certainty to the minimum, he cancels every possible landing place - to the point of leaving the viewer with the uncertainty of being elsewhere, as he likes to say.

"It is an exhibition about the body, about matter, about desire but also about feeling, because the search for pleasure and freedom is there and evident. To do this, I relate three different works: a sound performance for voices (Tale corner: Brothers in Art, 2012), on the wall we find a silent image of dust on which to rest our gaze (Lying void of pleasure, 2019) and a work that acts on two different expressive planes, the sculptural and the photographic (The aftershave victory, 2023)... the question of time is a relevant element, because it is to be understood as a process in which something happens between a moment before and one just after. ... his focus falls on the series The aftershave victory... at a certain point between the idea, the production and the documentation something unexpected happened, I found myself without realising it in front of and within the same scene, told with different morphologies and functions... it is that approaching of the instant in which we will be perceived in an indissolubly simultaneous way..." - Gianluca Codeghini

Gianluca Codeghini juxtaposes very different interventions, put in relation they take on an autonomous rather than allusive or emotional role. The connection is there but cannot be seen, it is felt but not so well, we find it but it is not very evident, it leaves a trail. These are relations between being thought and becoming action that cause a detachment between things, they lose adherence and take the distance between a before and an after.

The asymmetry, collapse, dust, cavity, error, noise, interference and the rest constitute performing components from which events ensue that, in turn, drag the evolution of things from one side of reality to the other - 'to the point', again, 'of leaving in the memory the doubt of having touched at a distance or of not having kissed or shouted at all'.

GIANLUCA CODEGHINI (1968) lives and works in Milan.

From his first musical and performance projects of the eighties as in his subsequent installations Conservare fuori dalla portata (1992), La patologia del benessere (1996) and as in the most recent works Crudeltà inaudite (2007), Pezzetti e bocconi (2009), A slow movement between my fingers (2012) and Platone di esecuzione (2019), Gianluca Codeghini activates concepts and processes in which the relationship with and between the public becomes fundamental in the production of short circuits, tensions and discrete, undisciplined provocations. Contraptions prepared with acute care and a meticulousness so thorough, instigating doubt in the mind of ever having practiced something else or not having practiced at all.

Gianluca Codeghini it is about resorting to a diversity of disciplines to include in the idea: videos, installations, paintings, sculptures, artist books, texts, actions, performances, compositions musical or curatorial (Warburghiana, Poe.mi, Laciecamateria, Riscrizioni di mondo). 

Gianluca Codeghini has been exhibiting in Italy and in other countries since 1990. Recently at: ASSAB ONE Milan; MAN Museum, Nuoro; Red Bull Music Accademy, Rome; ViaFarini, Milan; MART Museum, Rovereto Trento; GAMEC Museum, Bergamo; NEON, Bologna and Milan; MUDIMA Foundation, Milan; MLAC Museum Laboratory "la Sapienza" University, Rome; Baruchello Foundation, Rome; Prometeo Gallery, Milan; Pomodoro Foundation, Milan; ALT Leggeri&Radici Foundation, Alzano Lombardo Bergamo; RCM, Paris; SIX, Milan...

GALLERIA SIX 

Piazzale Gabrio Piola, 5 - 20131 Milano

www.galleriasix.it

Luca Rossi Exhibition @ Galleria Six, Milan

Luca Rossi

Galleria Six, Milan

16 décembre 2023 - 18 janvier 2024

LUCA ROSSI

If you don’t understand something search for it on YouTube, 2023

53x90 cm, reproduction of Leonardo Da Vinci's 'Lady with an Ermine' 

purchased online, pre-spaced in red on its own box 

© Luca Rossi, Courtesy Galleria Six

The exhibition at Galleria SIX presents the development of three project lines that LUCA ROSSI has been working on constantly since 2009. 

The first series of works represents the development of the project Luca Rossi presented in 2019 on the occasion of his first solo exhibition at Galleria Six. Some iconic works from the history of art are confronted with their own "empty box" in an exciting dynamic between ancient, modern, postmodern and the current "altermodern" phase (c.f. Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant, Postmediabooks, 2014). 

The second series of works, complementary to the first, still focuses on the "management of information" as a central element of contemporaneity: some works where three modern and contemporary artists meet are exhibited "hidden" and with only the possibility of seeing the three names in the work. This choice 'protects' the work of art from a chaotic and hyper-digitalised present where our imagination, like the values of expectation and surprise, are systematically stifled and anaesthetised. 

The third series of works presents a large collective action organised by Luca Rossi in Kassel in 2022 and in conjunction with the Documenta 15 event. The project, still in progress, opens up to a transcendent and mysterious dimension whereby our screen becomes a sort of "amulet" and "pagan idol" to which we are asked to "believe" or "not believe".

Since 2009 "Luca Rossi", artist,  open collective, blogger, critic, curator, controversial figure in the art system, has been trying to stimulate more critical discussion on a daily basis in the field of contemporary art, as a subject that could play a fundamental role in our present. Luca Rossi has been described by Fabio Cavallucci as the most interesting artistic personality in Italy. 

In 2014, Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, interviewed in Artribune, referred to Luca Rossi as the future promise of contemporary art.  

Luca Rossi's critical reflections, which have reached 900,000 people on social media in the last 12 months, conducted for years with unwavering faith, have led him to an unconventional artistic practice, also characterised by popularisation and training projects with the creation in 2016 of the 'Luca Rossi Art Academy' (www.documenta.live). 

Despite some "critical nodes" being extremely well known in the art system (identified and disclosed by Luca Rossi as "Evolved Ikea", "Young Indiana Jones Syndrome" "Grandparents Parents Foundation", etc.), Luca Rossi still lives a condition of ostracism in a system that struggles to accept some of his "uncomfortable" reflections and alternative strategies, which are increasingly necessary and urgent. 

In 2014, the famous art critic Angela Vettese declared that since reading Luca Rossi's texts, she has decided to no longer dedicate herself to the practice of art but only to theory.

GALLERIA SIX

Piazza Piola 5, 20131, Milano

www.galleriasix.it

Lucia Di Luciano @ Art Brussels 2023 - Presented by 10 A.M. ART, Milan

Lucia Di Luciano

10 A.M. ART, Milan

@ Art Brussels 2023

20 – 23 April 2023

LUCIA DI LUCIANO

Curve and straight. The line in Italian abstract-kinetic research

Courtesy 10 A.M. ART, Milan 

Photo by Mattia Mognetti

For Art Brussels 2023, 10 A.M. ART Gallery presents a solo show by LUCIA DI LUCIANO, invited to the 59th Venice Biennale International Art Exposition, curated by Cecilia Alemani.

Lucia Di Luciano is an artist of primary importance in Italian Programmed Art. The role of Italy, in the developments of the “New Tendency” exhibition held in 1961 in Zagreb, was very important. This is the context in which Lucia Di Luciano has her place. Her research is directed towards explorations and conclusions involving logic and mathematics, towards the definition of geometric modules that allow her artistic activity to be combined with architecture and industrial design. The work produced by Lucia Di Luciano takes its cue from an analysis of visual processes originating from Gestalt theory, and they are placed in an approach which we could describe as structuralist, featuring painting-based investigations of a mathematical nature. The desire to conform to rigorous geometric rules led, in the works from the 1960s, to the development of a mark as image in which colour, as a potentially emotive and subjective factor, is banished. What is dominant are the mere operational processes that create form. The works of this period present a sort of fundamental alphabet, articulated alternatively in accordance with rhythmic progressions and structurations of geometric modules produced by lines, squares and rectangles.

On the one hand, these cancel all distinction between figure and background, generating a perceptual instability between positive and negative. On the other hand, however, they engender an effect of overlapping grids that give the image a clear multidimensionality. The works created by Di Luciano explicate at the highest level, in their black-and-white severity, in the modular and reiterated nature of the forms-cum-marks, the utopia of an art that aims to reflect on its own function in the context of a new society founded on technology. Painting thus becomes an epistemological metaphor, in which the central idea is the procedure, rather than the result: indeed, the possibility of controlling and preordaining the visual result, of programming it on the basis of a method of construction of the image that is rigorous and objective, goes hand-in-hand with the activation of a virtual movement that the observer is led to follow and complete by taking part, by means of their own perceptual and mental mechanisms, in the generation of the work itself.

Later, there was a return to colour also for Lucia Di Luciano: in a non-systematic way between the 60s and 70s, and thereafter, down to her more recent works, with the gradual introduction of primary hues. This would not be a betrayal of her original propositions, but an inevitable continuation of an investigation into optical perception, as Di Luciano put into practice, for example, in the “Gradienti” series, images full of imaginative verve combined with scientific rigour.

10 A.M. ART Gallery

Corso San Gottardo 5, 20136 Milano

www.10amart.it

www.artbrussels.com

Augusto Betti: Artist + Designer @ Fondazione Sozzani, Milan - Restrospective Exhibition Curated by Gherardo Tonelli

Augusto Betti: artista + designer 

Curated by Gherardo Tonelli 

Fondazione Sozzani, Milan 

April 16 – May 14, 2023 

On the occasion of miart and Milan Design Week 2023, Fondazione Sozzani in collaboration with Paradisoterrestre presents the exhibition Augusto Betti. Artista e designer, curated by Gherardo Tonelli. The result of a process of rediscovery and re-evaluation of the fascinating figure of Augusto Betti, the retrospective is dedicated to one of the least known and most surprising creative mind of the 20th century and features his work, which is complex and diverse but always consistent.

Painter and artist experimenting with new theories and materials, pupil of Giorgio Morandi and Giovanni Romagnoli at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna; designer and above all teacher; close associate of Silvio Ceccato, Director of Centro di Cibernetica e di Attività Linguistiche of the University of Milan and Gerardo Filiberto Dasi (Centro Pio Manzù, Rimini). A rich and stimulating life for Augusto Betti who, out of reluctance and character, relegated the outcomes of his creative production to an intimate and private dimension. On the rare occasions when he decided to participate in shows and exhibitions, his name appeared together with important figures in contemporary art such as Marina Apollonio, Agostino Bonalumi, Enrico Castellani, Gianni Colombo, Dadamaino, Lucio Fontana, Ugo La Pietra, Piero Manzoni, and Elio Marchegiani, and his work gained recognition from distinguished critics, including Umbro Apollonio, Giulio Carlo Argan, Palma Bucarelli, Carla Lonzi.

For Augusto Betti, art was not an aesthetic but an emotional quest. Stepping outside the classical canons, he found himself deeply exploring different areas: from energy and psychology to the mysteries of life. The exhibition delves into a forward-looking research projected into the future. It is rooted in the historical period in which it was undertaken but, at the same time, is surprisingly contemporary.

Alongside his artworks, on view also design pieces now part of Paradisoterrestre catalogue. Among these, the Noodle armchair (1967), created to explain to students the importance of free gestures in the generation of ideas, and the ceramic tea set - a material of choice from his hometown of Faenza – which Betti describes as his "most successful design object" (1975). Presented for the first time the re-editions of the Prisma armchair and sofa (1971), conceived during lectures to his students, and the Glass coffee table (1967), a smoked glass element whose cubic conformation allows for different compositional variations.

From the archive managed by his daughter Cristiana Betti come the very rare artworks from the "cassette" series (1959-1961); the resin and fiberglass sculptures Pulsazioni (1964), Scatola dei sentimenti (1964), Struttura equilibrante (1964), Obelisco (1965), Ballerina (1965), Vibrazioni (1967), Orgonoscopio (1967), Camera con lenti (1969); and also Austere chair and table (1967), Parete luce lamp (1967), Foemina chair (1967), Ciclope chair (1972).

AUGUSTO BETTI (1919-2013) became an orphan at the age of nine. The eldest of his siblings, he worked in the Focaccia and Melandri ceramic workshop. He could not pursue the art studies he loved but managed to attend evening classes at the local Municipal School of Drawing. In 1935 he enrolled in the mechanical construction course at the Aeronautical Institute in Forlì. 

During World War II, he was a mechanical engineer with Primo Stormo da Caccia in Udine, with missions in North Africa, Greece, Algeria. At the end of the war, he began to paint: his first painting was Il ritratto di Jole (1945), the portrait of his young wife. 

In 1946 he held his first solo painting exhibition at the Gamberini gallery in Forlì. In 1947 he was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, where his teachers were Giorgio Morandi and Giovanni Romagnoli. Here he deepened his fresco technique. At the same time, he worked in Decio Podio's painting restoration workshop, where he acquired a remarkable sensitivity and mastery of color. He participated in a series of figurative painting exhibitions. Despite his success, also commercial, in 1955 he opened a laundry-business with his wife to be free to devote himself to experimentation in the artistic field. 

He named his first abstract artworks “cassette (boxes)”, because they were made from square wooden boxes, about a meter wide and a dozen centimeters deep, closed by transparent material, in which he inserted elements that created changing plays of light and movement depending on the point of view. He also began to experiment with the countless possibilities of new synthetic materials. In the same years he created the “semisfere (half-spheres)”, made using the bottom of demijohns as a mold, which were hung and projected colored moving images on the walls. His work met the interests of Silvio Ceccato, director of Centro di Cibernetica e di Attività Linguistiche of the University of Milan, with whom he collaborated for several years. He also collaborated for a very long period with Centro Pio Manzù in Rimini, contributing, among other things, to the organization of the Convegni Internazionali Artisti Critici e Studiosi d’Arte, at which he met the major artists and art critics of the time, several of whom became his friends.

In 1963 a solo exhibition was held at Palazzo del Turismo in Riccione as part of the events of the XII Convegno Internazionale Artisti Critici e Studiosi d’Arte. From 1965 to 1984 he taught Professional Drawing at the Art Institute of Faenza. Particularly interested in the processes

by which creativity develops, which he believed to be inherent in every human being from childhood, he carried out in-depth personal studies in this field.

He then devoted himself to design, and with Habitat Sintoni of Faenza, he realized: the Noodle armchair, the Parete luce floor lamp, the Foemina and Austere table and chair, and the Glass coffee table (1967); the Flou sofa and armchair and the Oscillante armchair (1968), the Prisma sofa and armchair (1971), and the Ciclope chair (1972).

In 1967 he participated with Orgonoscopio at VI Biennale d’arte Repubblica di San Marino - Nuove tecniche d’Immagine, chaired by Giulio Carlo Argan, Palma Bucarelli, Umbro Apollonio, Gian Alberto dall'Acqua. In 1968 he participated in the group show Achromes in Milan alongside Agostino Bonalumi, Enrico Castellani, Gianni Colombo, Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni and others. From 1980 to 1986 he assumed the chair of Theory of Perception at the Istituto Industrie Artistiche in Faenza. His hometown Faenza dedicated to him in 2001 the exhibition Forme della vita at Palazzo delle Esposizioni and in 2006 the exhibition at Galleria della Molinella. His solo exhibition Riflessi promoted by the Municipality of Palazzuolo sul Senio dates back to 2003.

Since 2022, historic Italian design brand Paradisoterrestre has embarked on a journey to rediscover and enhance the work of Augusto Betti with the exhibition Augusto Betti – Trasversale • Pulsazione • Ritmo at Paradisoterrestre gallery in Bologna and by including in its catalogue the re-editions of design pieces such as Noodle armchair, the tea set designed in 1975, Prisma armchair and sofa, Glass coffee table.

Paradisoterrestre is a historic Italian design brand, Dino Gavina's last major enterprise conceived in the late Seventies and inaugurated in 1983. In 2017 Gherardo Tonelli relaunched the brand, with a catalogue ranging from re-editions of historical pieces - designed among the others by Roberto Matta, Kazuhide Takahama and Man Ray - to new collections in collaboration with designers and artists such as Pierre Gonalons, Tobia Scarpa, Paola Pivi and Allen Jones.

In 2018 Paradisoterrestre opened a gallery in Bologna, a hybrid space between art and design, where major exhibitions took place: ULTRAMATTA - Roberto Matta's amazing adventure in the world of design (2019); TOBIA SCARPA - Dall’arte della misura silenziosamente (2020); Paola Pivi - Rock the art (2021), Augusto Betti - Trasversale • Pulsazione • Ritmo (2022) and Cento % Dino (2022).

paradisoterrestre.it

Fondazione Sozzani was established in 2016 by Carla Sozzani and is dedicated to the promotion of culture through photography, fashion, the fine arts, and applied arts. The Foundation has has assumed the patronage of Galleria Carla Sozzani and continues all relevant public functions that the Gallery has supported since 1990.

FONDAZIONE SOZZANI

corso Como 10 – 20154 Milano

fondazionesozzani.org

_____________

Leandro Erlich Exhibition @ Palazzo Reale, Milan

Leandro Erlich

Palazzo Reale, Milan

22 April – 4 October 2023

LEANDRO ERLICH

Bâtiment (2004)

A building facade laid flat under a mirror suspended at a 45-degree angle

Dimensions variable

Fourteen different facades each specific to the city that

hosted the temporary installation

Nuit Blanche, Paris, France, 2004

Courtesy Galleria Continua

LEANDRO ERLICH

Changing rooms (2008)

Paneling, stools, golden frames, mirrors, curtains, carpet and lights

Dimensions variable

© Kioku Keizo, Morti Art Museum

Courtesy Galleria Continua

Palazzo Reale in Milan will host for the first time in Europe a large-scale solo exhibition of one of the most prominent figures on the international art scene: Leandro Erlich.

An Argentine artist born in Buenos Aires in 1973, Leandro Erlich creates large installations with which the public relates and interacts, becoming the artwork itself.

His unique works represent something absolutely new in the art world, bringing together creativity, vision, emotion, and fun.

Buildings on which one appears to climb, houses uprooted and suspended in mid-air, lifts going nowhere, escalators tangled like threads in a ball of yarn, disorienting and surreal sculptures, and videos that subvert normality.

These are all elements recounting something ordinary in an extraordinary context, in which everything is different from what it seems, and where we lose our sense of reality and perception of space.

Leandro Erlich’s works are the result of a profound and conceptual artistic exploration that flows into paradox and has already won over millions of visitors worldwide: 600,000 in Tokyo and 300,000 in Buenos Aires. Everywhere, the public has thronged to his exhibitions which are characterized by site-specific installations that are highly complex to make, and therefore quite rare.

At Palazzo Reale, visitors will be given the opportunity to become better acquainted with Leandro Erlich’s art through his best-known and most iconic works, brought together for the first time in a single venue with the aim of systematizing the artist’s output.

Leandro Erlich takes us to a magical elsewhere, where the possible becomes impossible, but that astonishes and excites thanks to a great aesthetic sense and a highly intrinsic poetry.

The result his explosive, fun, exciting, and unforgettable.

His work explores the perceptual bases of reality and our ability to question these same bases through a visual framework. The architecture of the everyday is a recurring theme in Leandro Erlich’s art, which aims to create a dialogue between what we believe and what we see, just as it seeks to bridge the gap between museum space and everyday experience.

LEANDRO ERLICH

The cloud (2012)

Digital ceramic ink printed on ultra-clear glass, wooden case, and LED lights

Dimensions variable and different series

© Kioku Keizo, Morti Art Museum

Courtesy Galleria Continua

LEANDRO ERLICH

Classroom (2017)

Two rooms of identical dimensions, wood, windows,

desk, chairs, door, glass, lights, blackboard, school

supplies and other classroom decorations, and black boxes

Dimensions variable

Kioku Keizo, Morti Art Museum

The artist describes himself in the following way: I like to present myself as a conceptual artist working in the realm of reality and perception. My subject is reality, symbols and the potential for meaning. I strive to create a body of work – especially in the public sphere – that is open to the imagination, subverts normality, rethinks representation, and proposes actions that construct and deconstruct situations to disrupt reality. Speaking generally.

Each of Leandro Erlich’s works is to be read as a window onto the world that is sensitive to the gaze, that instead of misleading reveals the landscape that every person holds within his or her self.

At first reaction, an Leandro Erlich work elicits a sense of familiarity with respect to the everyday, before raising a certain, insinuating doubt. By carefully gazing at the work, viewers begin to doubt what they perceive, as they are confronted with an inexplicable phenomenon.

Stirring up questions, doubts, and emotions in the public interacting with his works is leandro Erlich’s primary thought, and it is the viewer’s participation that makes the work complete. It is difficult to explain Erlich with words. He has to be experienced to be understood.

Promoted by the Municipality of Milan-Culture, the exhibition is produced and organized by Palazzo Reale and Arthemisia in collaboration with Studio Erlich, and is curated by Francesco Stocchi.

LEANDRO ERLICH - BIOGRAPHY

A world-renowned contemporary Argentine artist, Leandro Erlich creates works that use optical illusions and sound effects to shake our notions of common sense. Although what the public sees, from the large-scale installation to videos, might appear familiar at first sight, closer examination reveals a surprising and unsettling deviation from the usual, in the form, for example of a boat floating in the absence of water, or of people attached to the wall in various poses.

Born in Argentina in 1973. Lives and works in Paris, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo.

In recent times, his exhibitions have broken all admissions records, regardless of geography or type of institution: from MORI Art Museum (Tokyo, 2017) which attracted more than 600,000 visitors, to HOW Art Museum (Shanghai, 2018) and Liminal, the major anthological exhibition at MALBA (Buenos Aires) seen by more than 300,000 people; at The Confines of The Great Void at CAFAM (Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing), China’s leading museum, Erlich became the first non-Chinese artist to occupy the entire exhibition space until the retrospective currently touring Brazil (CCBB Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo). In December 2022, a new version of Liminal, his first anthological exhibition in the United States, opened at PAMM in Miami, where it will be on display until September 2023.

Erlich began his professional career at 18 years of age with a solo exhibition at Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires and, after receiving several grants (El Fondo Nacional de las Artes, Fundación Antorchas), continued his studies in the Core Program, an artist residency in Houston (Glassell School of Art, 1998), where he developed his famed works Swimming Pool and Living Room. In 2000 he participated in the Whitney Biennale with Rain, and in 2001 he represented Argentina at the 49th Venice Biennale, with Swimming Pool, an emblematic piece that is part of the permanent collection of the 21st Century Museum of Art in Kanazawa (Japan) and the Voorlinden Museum (Netherlands).

Erlich has been honoured with numerous international critics’ awards, including the Roy Neuberger Exhibition Award (NY, 2017), Nomination for the Prix Marcel Duchamp (Paris, 2006), the UNESCO Prize (Istanbul, 2001), the Leonardo Prize (Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, 2000), and Fondo Nacional de las Artes (Buenos Aires, 1992).

His works can be found in many private and public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Tate Modern, London; Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; 21st Century Museum of Art Kanazawa, Japan; MACRO, Roma; The Jerusalem Museum; FNAC, France; Ville de Paris et SCNF, France; Voorlinden Museum, Netherlands; MUSAC, Spain.

PALAZZO REALE, MILANO

www.palazzorealemilano.it

The line in Italian abstract-kinetic research @ 10 A.M. ART Gallery, Milan

Curve and straight. 

The line in Italian abstract-kinetic research

10 A.M. ART Gallery, Milan

27 October 2022 - 27 January 2023

The 10 A.M. ART gallery in Milan presents the exhibition Curve and straight. The line in Italian abstract-kinetic research.

Curator Paolo Bolpagni tells us:

Abstract-kinetic research, both at its peak and in the pioneering experiments that anticipated it, is characterized by certain common elements: the adoption of a formal lexicon that is mostly geometric, the frequent aspiration to investigate ways of seeing, the pursuit of the pictorial rendering of dynamism and optical phenomena and light, the recurrent recourse to effects of modularity, pulsation, permutation, dissociation or distortion, and the overcoming of the traditional concept of art as expression, overtaken by the investigation of perceptive and psychological mechanisms. Furthermore, it was essential for the exponents of this current to return to the fundamentals of pictorial language, often elevated to become the focus of investigation or redefined.

Juxtaposing the works of Luigi Veronesi, Franco Grignani, Mario Ballocco, Lucia Di Luciano, Giovanni Pizzo, Ennio L. Chiggio, Claudio D’Angelo and Marina Apollonio serves first and foremost to assess the relationship between two generations (the first three were born at the beginning of the 20th century, the others between 1933 and 1940). Equally importantly, it serves to recognize the value and variety of research that on the one hand still shows its strength and topicality, while on the other it continues to astonish us with the infinite field of possibilities opened up by the use of just a few basic ‘ingredients’. Indeed, Western music is constructed almost entirely on twelve semitones: just seven notes and five alterations, which have been used for perhaps the most extraordinary creative achievements of human civilization – from Bach to Mahler. Consequently, on the occasion of the exhibition organized by 10 A.M. ART, the focus has been placed on the generative faculties of the line, in reference to a twenty-year period of time, from Mario Ballocco’s Contrasti simultanei of 1956 to Claudio D’Angelo’s triptych Progetto di spazio of 1976, with the only temporal overrun represented by the unitary cycle of ten paintings by Lucia Di Luciano produced in 2003: Verticalità dalla 2 alla 11. There are twenty works in total, selected for the two floors of the gallery: on the ground floor are four paintings by Luigi Veronesi from the 1970s (Composizione Q12 from 1973, Composizione T2 from 1974 and, both from 1975, Costruzione Epsilon Variante 4 and Costruzione Sigma 6), in which the line is the main instrument used for acquiring cognition of the figurative passage of time within the spatial infinity of the plane, gaining the ability to fix it in a rhythmic reality, so that the individual piece is not the final goal, but a moment ‘frozen’ in the flow of an unlimited duration. These works are flanked by Marina Apollonio’s vertiginous curved variations (Verde + Blu 8N from 1966–71, No. 44 Gradazione 8+8P nero bianco su nero from 1966–72 and Dinamica circolare Cratere N from 1968), which test the mechanisms of our brain, and Claudio D’Angelo’s rarefied Progetto di spazio, ‘visual outcrops’ in which the gestalt principles of continuity and ‘common fate’ are applied with originality and sagacity. The choice of the three works by Mario Ballocco is exemplary precisely in the exploration of the ‘etymon’ and the perceptive repercussions – to quote and paraphrase the title of a canvas from 1975 – of the straight line and the curve, both in relation to colour (as in Contrasti simultanei of 1956) and in the simplicity of black and white, all the way through to the reductio ad unum of the acrylic painting Effetto bidimensionale del cerchio, which symbolically returns to Vasari’s anecdote about Giotto as a young boy, or to the ‘magical’ and mysterious purity of a simple circumference. Franco Grignani, in both his Vibrazione induttiva of 1965 and his Interlinea 18A of 1963, makes the straight line and the curve interact and alternate, producing virtuosic variations that tickle the visual faculties. Ennio L. Chiggio is perhaps the most optical of the artists in this exhibition. In Interferenza Lineare 8 of 1966, he overlaps a double airbrushed plexiglass plate, which distorts perception and generates the illusion of movement. In Dispositivo A+B of 1964, he instead works on sequential and repetitive forms, developing the phenomenal component of the pictorial act. The works of Giovanni Pizzo and Lucia Di Luciano are displayed on the ground and lower floors of the gallery (as are those of Apollonio, Grignani and Chiggio). The former features with two Sign-Gestalt pieces (from 1964 and 1965) that allude to the notion of a ‘sign-form’, alternately articulated according to progressions and rhythmic structuring of geometric modules produced by lines, squares and rectangles, which do away with any distinction between ‘figure’ and ‘background’, provoking a perceptive instability between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’. Meanwhile, Lucia Di Luciano – following on, like Marina Apollonio, from her triumphant presence in the Central Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2022 – is present with two works from very different periods, namely Discontinuità ritmica in orizzontale e successione in verticale of 1965 and the aforementioned Verticalità dalla 2 alla 11 of 2003. We progress from the rigour of severe black and white to the exploration of chromatic dynamics, but without losing sight of the mastery in handling the multiple possible combinations of the line, which is the absolute protagonist of her research and that of the other artists featured here.

Marina Apollonio, born in Trieste in 1940, is one of the most representative figures of international optical and kinetic art. Daughter of the great scholar Umbro Apollonio, she studied under Giuseppe Santomaso at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice. She went on to devote herself to industrial graphic design and interior architecture solutions, before beginning her research into perception and visual communication in 1962. After a period in Paris, she returned to Italy in 1964 and produced her first metal reliefs in alternating colour sequences. From 1965 onwards she gravitated around Gruppo N in Padua and Gruppo T in Milan, sharing both their research intentions and choice of materials. Since 1975, she has been producing works based on the orthogonal relationship of coloured, vertical and horizontal parallel lines against a black background. She exhibits her work extensively. In 2022, she featured with some important works in the Central Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

(P. B.)

Mario Ballocco (Milan, 1913–2008) was a forerunner in numerous fields: a highly consistent abstract painter, he made a fundamental contribution to exploring colour and visual perception. After studying with Aldo Carpi at the Brera Academy, he came into contact with Lucio Fontana in Argentina in 1947. Having founded the Gruppo Origine (also joined by Alberto Burri, Giuseppe Capogrossi and Ettore Colla) in Milan in 1950, he went on to establish and edit the AZ (1949–52) and Colore. Estetica e Logica magazines (1957–64). In 1952–53 he curated design shows and an exhibition on the history of photography in Milan. Ballocco was the inventor of “chromatology”, an interdisciplinary method for solving “visual problems of collective interest”. He featured twice at the Venice Biennale with solo exhibitions/tributes (in 1970 and 1986). It is also worth mentioning his teaching activity, which began in the early 1970s at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts.

(P. B.)

Ennio Ludovico Chiggio (Naples, 1938 – Padua, 2020) attended the Academy and the Faculty of Architecture in Venice on a somewhat irregular basis. In 1957, he began painting works of informal inspiration. In 1958 he came into contact with a group of young Paduan artists, while in 1960 he was one of the five members of Gruppo N, with which he participated in the ‘Arte programmata’ exhibition, presented by Umberto Eco in Milan in 1962. He developed an interest in visual poetry and photographic concretism. In 1963–64 he took part in ‘Nuove Tendenze 2’ at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia. In 1964 he presented his electronic work Ambiente sonoro at the Venice Biennale. In May 1965 he founded the Gruppo di Fonologia sperimentale NPS with Teresa Rampazzi, Serenella Marega and Memo Alfonsi, for the production of sound objects with electronic music. He also turned his attention to the study of body kinetics, environmental planning and design. Between the 1970s and 1980s he produced works in which red-and-white fields alternate geometrically, leading the viewer to meditate on visual instability. From 1978 to 1989 he taught Design and Industrial Aesthetics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice.

(P. B.)

Claudio D’Angelo (Tripoli, 1938 – Ascoli Piceno, 2011) was born in Libya to parents from the Marche region. In 1942, the family returned to their place of origin in Italy. As a teenager, he became interested in visual arts and music. After an informal and neo-Dadaist pictorial debut, in the second half of the 1960s he moved more and more in the direction of geometry and design, eventually developing his own aniconic language. His first investigations into the exactness of the image and the kinematics of spatial configurations date back to 1964. In 1966 he came into contact with the gallery owner Fiamma Vigo, who took an immediate interest in his work, making him participate in national and international exhibitions. In 1968 he developed modular organisms using “Forme toroidali” (toroidal forms). The 1970s opened with a series of works that D’Angelo termed Ipotesi progettuale. This was followed by the cycle of Progetto di spazio and Progetti di genesi dinamica dello spazio. In 1976 he came up with studies, called Analysis situs, aimed at structuring photodynamic values through combinatorial sequences of signs. He also began developing installation-environments and performances. In the 1980s, his research took on the sign-archetype as a sounding out of complex stratifications of the latent ego. A turning point arrived with the appearance of the colour blue, as well as extra-pictorial materials (fabric, glass, plexiglass, metal), accompanying him to the end.

(P. B.)

Lucia Di Luciano was born in Siracusa in 1933. After arriving in Rome, she attended the Academy of Fine Arts, where she met Giovanni Pizzo. The pair married in 1959. In 1963, together with Francesco Guerrieri and Lia Drei, they founded the Gruppo 63, which gave itself a strongly rationalistic imprint within the context of kinetic-programmed research. This group of four was short-lived due to programmatic differences. As early as 1964, Lucia Di Luciano and Giovanni Pizzo set up Operativo R, involving Carlo Carchietti, Franco Di Vito and Mario Rulli in the new team. The works produced in that period were based on the analysis of visual processes of a gestalt stamp. Lucia Di Luciano’s works often feature overlapping black and white grids, which gives the image an evident multi-dimensionality. Then came the return to colour, with the gradual introduction of primary tones. This was not a betrayal of her original assumptions, but the furthering of an investigation into optical perception, which Di Luciano would put into practice in the Gradienti series, among others, featuring works steeped in imaginative verve combined with scientific rigour. In 2022, she exhibited in the Central Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

(P. B.)

Franco Grignani (Pieve Porto Morone, Pavia, 1908 – Milan, 1999) participated in the manifestations of Second Futurism from a very young age, exhibiting extensively. After leaving the Faculty of Mathematics, he moved to Turin in 1929 to enrol in Architecture and, at the end of his studies, he moved to Milan, working in exhibition and graphic design. As regards his artistic research, from 1935 onwards he abandoned all figurative references to devote himself to experimenting with his camera too: this led him to approach the abstractionist and constructivist avant-garde movements. After being called up at the outbreak of the Second World War, he was entrusted with teaching an aerial sighting course. This experience led him to take an interest in the analysis of optical perception. At the end of the war he resumed his work in graphic design, but devoted more and more time and attention to art. From now on, his painting was an ongoing experiment that ranged from spurious mathematics to optical techniques, without, however, abandoning a constructive freedom open to new insights. His meeting with gallery owner Lorenzelli gave him the opportunity to display the results of his extensive research and to start a long exhibition collaboration. In 1975, the Municipality of Milan dedicated an anthological exhibition to him at the Rotonda della Besana. In 1980, he began teaching at the NABA – New Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, which named one of its department after him.

(P. B.)

Giovanni Pizzo (Veroli, Frosinone, 1934 – Rome 2022), came to Rome and graduated in architecture in 1955. In 1959 he married Lucia Di Luciano. In 1963 he founded Gruppo 63 with her, Francesco Guerrieri and Lia Drei, adopting a logical-mathematical approach aimed at defining geometric modules to allow art to be combined with industrial design and architecture. The association was short-lived, and in 1964 he and Lucia Di Luciano founded Operativo R, also involving Carlo Carchietti, Franco Di Vito and Mario Rulli. The works produced in that period featured a blend of scientific research and virtuosic technique. His study of Bertrand Russell’s texts on mathematical logic and his desire to conform to strict geometric rules determined the creation of a “sign-image” where colour, as a potentially emotional and subjective factor, is banished. He mostly worked on Masonite or in any case plates, whose dimensions are based on the proportional ratios of the golden section. His compositions feature the prefix Sign-Gestalt in the title: a sort of primary element of a fundamental alphabet, developed according to progressions and rhythmic structuring of geometric modules. His return to colour would be accompanied by further study of optical perception, in a so-called “geometric-rational” phase during which Pizzo discovered the potential of Albert H. Munsell’s Atlas.

(P. B.)

Luigi Veronesi (Milan, 1908–98) enrolled at the technical institute, attended a course for textile designers and studied painting under Carmelo Violante. At a very young age, he approached the artists who gravitated around the Galleria Il Milione. As he drew closer to abstract art, he joined the Abstraction-Création group in 1934. Fundamental to this period were his encounters with Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy and Max Bill, which enabled him to absorb the teachings of the Bauhaus and get to know the work of Malevich, Lissitzky and Rodchenko. In the meantime, he worked with Campo Grafico magazine. In the 1930s and 1940s he developed a personal geometric-constructivist abstractionism, while remaining open to different spheres of expression: painting, photography, engraving, cinema and set design. In 1947 he joined La Bussola photographic group, signing its manifesto, while in 1948 he joined the M.A.C. (Movimento Arte Concreta). In the 1950s and 1960s, Veronesi received his first important recognitions (prizes, participation in the Venice Biennale and the Bienal de São Paulo in Brazil, solo exhibitions in Italy and abroad) and went through a period of restless openness to certain instances of Informal Art, later overcome during his return to a clear lyrical-constructivist geometricism. He also began teaching at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts (where he “inherited” the chromatology course introduced by Mario Ballocco), and then at the New Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. In the 1980s and 1990s, his renewed interest in photography and film was combined with work in the field of applied art, with frescoes, projects for public spaces and outdoor graphic interventions.

(P. B.)

10 A.M. ART

Corso San Gottardo, 5 - 20136 Milano

www.10amart.it

_______________

Ange Leccia @ Galleria Six, Milan & Venice - Cars, Marble and Cinder Block

Ange Leccia 

Cars, Marble and Cinder Block 

Galleria Six, Milan & Venice 

March 26 - June 25, 2022 

Galleria Six presents ANGE LECCIA's solo exhibition, Cars, Marble and Cinder Block. This is his second show at the gallery after Ange Leccia: Girls, Ghosts and war (2018-2019).

The exhibition focuses on both sculptural and installation works. The pieces are concerned with the constant relationship between light and image: an image that disorients our gaze, our thinking and leads us to question the subtle relationship between man, technology and identity.

In this exhibition the photographic works, Arrangement, are related both formally and conceptually to the sculptures on display. 

In fact the construction of an enigmatic space placed between the proximity of two or more objects, seems to constitute 'the original gesture' upon which the artist leads us to reflect.

For the occasion a work by Ange Leccia is exhibited in the new space in Venice at Calle de la Vida San Marco 2530.

For the Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris, Ange Leccia has created a video installation, (D') Aprés Monet, which proposes to feel and read the polysemy of Monets Water Lillies from the story of the genesis of this masterpiece. 

Ange Leccia, born in 1952 in Minerviu, Corsica, lives and works in Paris and Corsica. After studying visual arts, he became dually involved as a visual artist and filmmaker, and initiated his research as a resident at the French Academy in Rome. His work has been shown at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Documenta in Kassel, Skulptur Projekte in Münster, the Venice Biennale, the Seibu Museum, Hiroshima Art Document, among others. Ange Leccia has taught at Geidai Tokyo University of the Arts. He was a resident at Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto. In 2013, he had a solo exhibition at the MAC/VAL, as well as the Palais de Tokyo in 2014, and the HAB in Nantes during the summer of 2016. In 2017, he had a retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery in Reykjavik. In 2018, he participated in Printemps de Septembre in Toulouse. In 2019, he had a solo exhibition at the Abbaye de Jumièges and the Akureyri Art Museum in Iceland. In 2022, he will exhibit his work at the Artizon Museum in Tokyo, the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, the Musée des Impressionnismes in Giverny, and the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Ange Leccia has directed numerous films and fashion shows for big names in the fashion world such as Vuitton and Hermès. He recently co-directed the feature film Christophe Définitivement with the artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. It will be released in 2022.

GALLERIA SIX

Piazza Piola 5 - 20131 Milan

Calle de la Vida San Marco, 2530 - Venice

www.galleriasix.it

Karl Lagerfeld, Anna Piaggi @ Fondazione Sozzani, Milan - Illustrated journal of an Anna-Chronistic way of dressing - Anna Piaggi drawn by Karl Lagerfeld

Karl Lagerfeld, Anna Piaggi

Illustrated journal of an Anna-Chronistic way of dressing

Fondazione Sozzani, Milan

Through 28 November 2021

In two exhibitions:

A FASHION JOURNAL, the 90s

Anna Piaggi drawn by Karl Lagerfeld

Fondazione Sozzani, via Enrico Tazzoli 3 

ANNA–CHRONIQUE, the 70s and 80s

Anna Piaggi drawn by Karl Lagerfeld

Fondazione Sozzani, corso Como 10

Fondazione Sozzani presents in collaboration with Associazione Culturale Anna Piaggi “Karl Lagerfeld, Anna Piaggi. Illustrated journal of an Anna-chronistic way of dressing” in two exhibitions. One hundred and eighty original drawings by Karl Lagerfeld portray Anna Piaggi – muse, friend, and style icon in the 70s, 80s and 90s.

Since their first meeting in Paris in 1973, they become closely friends. Lagerfeld draws inspiration from Anna Piaggi’s continuous stylistic metamorphosis and portrays her between 1973 and 1996 in his homes in Brittany, in Monte Carlo, in Paris, or in a hotel during their numerous travels together, in Rome, Florence, London.

Many drawings portray Anna Piaggi in everyday situations, as she herself describes, “In most of the drawings there is a sort of ‘théatralisation’ of daily existence and Karl illustrates, documents and emphasizes this heightened, intimate life which, as he once said, ‘was not then public’.” 

And Karl Lagerfeld adds, “She scintillates on the everyday stage. She dramatizes the passing moment. Instinct is her memory.”

“Anna-chronique was begun in Paris at the table of a Chinese restaurant. On one of his cards Karl made a sketch of my head, with newly-cut cut hair by Henry Hebel og Vidal Sassoon in London, and of my accessory for the evening – a ‘telescopic’ fan with an ivory handle. Karl has continued to sketch me and many of my clothes, mostly in private, everyday life.”

Anna Piaggi, 1986

“Anna is a graphic person. In dressing herself she creates an image. She never provokes, she evokes. An unexpected detail, a tautology of style, a contradictory accessory, a surprising mixture, unforeseen associations of ideas and an indispensable touch of humor create a unique apperance which has always made me want to draw her.”

Karl Lagerfeld, 1986

The exhibition is divided in two sections:

“A Fashion Journal, the 90s” presents fifty unpublished drawings made by Karl Lagerfeld between 1990 and 1996. The pictorial stroke, pastel colors, and lights emphasize in a close view Anna Piaggi's face, hats, dresses and accessories.

“Anna-chronique, the 70s and 80s” presents one hundred and thirty drawings made between 1973 and 1984, which were collected in 1986 in a book with texts by Anna Piaggi and Karl Lagerfeld. Anna Piaggi’s writings, polaroids and photos, bijoux and hats are also on display.

ANNA PIAGGI (Milan, 1931 – 2012)

She was one of the first Italian journalists to write about fashion in the 60s. Her columns on Arianna, Panorama, L’Espresso, Vanity Fair, and Vogue – for which she invented the famous “Double Pages” – have become iconic. Through her close friendship with Vern Lambert, who owned a booth at Chelsea Antique Market in London she “discovered” vintage. Creative and always original, Anna Piaggi has interpreted fashion by showing off personal and inimitable looks, which have made her an icon of style. In 2006, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London dedicated her the exhibition “Fashion-ology”. In 2013, Palazzo Morando Costume Moda Immagine in Milan paid homage to her with the exhibition “Hat-ology, Anna Piaggi and her hats”.

KARL LAGERFELD (Hamburg, 1933 – Paris, 2019)

Starting his carreer as Pierre Balmain’s assistant, Karl Lagerfeld briefly worked at Jean Patou before joining Chloé in 1964. He soon became one of the fashion industry’s most acclaimed designers. At the head of Chanel since 1983, he also collaborated to the creation of Fendi’s ready-to-wear collections. The designer, who was a photographer and filmmaker as well, has often worked for the cinema, opera and theatre, such as the Burgtheater in Vienna and La Scala in Milan. In 2016, Palazzo Pitti dedicated him the exhibition “Karl Lagerfeld – Visions of Fashion”.

FONDAZIONE SOZZANI

corso Como 10 – 20154 Milano

via Enrico Tazzoli 3 – 20154 Milano

www.fondazionesozzani.org

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