ART-TRIBUTE:Passages in Italian Art at the Turn of the Millennium, Part I

MAXXI celebrates its 10th anniversary with the exhibition “Senzamargine” that pays tribute to nine masters of contemporary Italian art. The exhibition features large scale installations and major artworks realised in the artists maturity phase, therefore works senzamargine (without margins), which recalls the title of the avant-garde journal founded and edited by Alberto Boatto in 1968-69, to whom the Archive Wall also features an in-depth focus.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: MAXXI Archive

These nine masters represent the vitality and diversity of art in Italy and the turn of the Millennium; they are often considered on the margin of the well-known movements but who, over the years, have been able to maintain their independence and originality, such as to be considered reference points for artists of the following generations. Thanks to large-scaled and important environmental works, we see appearing in “Senzamargine. Passages in Italian Art at the Turn of the Millennium”, as the full Title of the exhibition is, some of the issues that are at the centre of today’s artistic reflections and, with them, a notion of Italian art that goes beyond geographical boundaries.

From her debut in 1947 with the abstract group Forma 1, and until her death, Carla Accardi was one of the most original figures of art in Italy. Her research immediately turned towards the abstract sign, condensed from the early 1950s in its most characteristic figure, a “cloud” of signs linked to each other and arranged on monochrome backgrounds. The spatial suggestion of these accumulations becomes explicit from the mid-1960s, when the artist substitutes canvas with a semi-rigid transparent plastic medium, sicofoil, on which she applies intensely coloured signs which in some cases also cover the frames behind them. The investigation of the sign will accompany the artist throughout her career up to the most recent works, such as the two canvases Bianco argento [Silver White] on display, on which simplified and geometric signs appear, typical of the style of her maturity. With the series of “sicofoil Rottoli” and Tende”, Accardi’s work conquers three-dimensional space and enters into a relationship with the scale of the human body, to the point of proposing, with “Triplice tenda” (1969-71), a direct confrontation with existential, psychic and political depth, connected with the notion of habitat.

Engaged in the renewal of sculpture from the mid-1960s onwards, Luciano Fabro of the best-known figures of Arte Povera and passionate theorist and teacher – was one of the protagonists of the artistic scene until his death in 2007. His research has focused on hybridisations and unusual combinations of materials, techniques, figurative suggestions and conceptual aspects of the sculptural language, in constant dialogue with the historical and cultural reality of his time. The first of the two works on display, “Enfasi (Baldacchino)”, consists of a horizontal structure, made of alternating strips of copper and aluminium, on which twenty metal rods are arranged, each bearing a face embossed as in ancient Roman clipei. The second work, “Italia all’asta” belongs to one of the most well-known series of Fabro’s work started in 1968. The cycle, translated into different materials and solutions, revolves around the iconographic theme of the Italian peninsula and composes an acute reflection on national identity, investigated in its various social, political and historical aspects. In

Since the early 1980s, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi have been building their films on archival films, recovered and enhanced to explore the political, historical and anthropological aspects of moving images and re-discuss their traditional narrative categories. In 1986, the two artists created “Dal Polo all’Equatore” based on the archives of filmmaker and documentary maker Luca Comerio which were rich in materials filmed during the period between the two world wars. To produce their films, the artists use an “analytical camera” consisting of two elements: in the first, the original 35 mm film runs vertically, operated by hand given the fragility of the material; the second, a camera aligned with the first element, allows the original images to be rephotographed in transparency. The work – accompanied on show by a large drawn “scroll” and other works on paper – raises fundamental questions about the relationship between cinema and history: the function of the word and the role of real time (and slow motion) in film, the value of testimony of documentary images.

Photographer, theorist, editor, curator and cultural animator Luigi Ghirri has been a key figure in contemporary visual culture since the late 1960s. At the start of the 1970s, he began a major phase of experimentation with photography, thanks also to his early and original use of color film. His work exhibited a reflective component that would always remain characteristic of his practice. Ghirri’s career started with an investigation of his homeland, Emilia-Romagna, centred on the definition of a new strategy of  observation: photography became a tool for the investigation of the surrounding environment, to reveal places that do not chime with the stereotypical image of Italy and to establish a new relationship with the area, revealing its deepest mysteries. The majority of the photographs presented here come from the archives of the “Lotus International” journal, with which Ghirri published his volume Paesaggio italiano in 1989. This was one of the most important projects in the artist’s career and testifies to a major phase in his work: after his initially more conceptual projects, his landscape analyses became more lyrical and allusive in the 1980s.

Starting from the mid-1960s, the research of Paolo Icaro integrates a reflection into sculpture both on its spatial characteristics and on its temporal and mental aspects. For Icaro, space is to be experienced with the body and sought in the becoming of time, in a dimension in which project and chance, intimacy and irony, come together in a continuous making and undoing of form and thought. After having participated in the first Arte Povera exhibitions and the main international shows of Process Art, starting in the 1970s he follows an independent path, outside of groups and trends, which takes him to different places – from Turin to Rome, from New York to Genoa – following the thread of his personal exploration of materials and the limits of sculptural language, up to the complete deconstruction of form. In ”Spiette” (1991-2020), a work displayed for the first time in an environmental dimension, Icaro punctuates space with 36 small plaster castings in which fragments of mirror glass are embedded. Positioned at different angles, the Spiette throw back a fragmentary image of surrounding space, in which, from reflection to reflection, the mirroring points weave an invisible web of glances. From the ceiling to the walls, the radiant energy spreads to the floor, where some scattered elements indicate further paths of proliferation and expansion of matter.

Leaving Greece for Rome in 1956, where he lived and worked until his death in 2017, Jannis Kounellis is one of the best-known figures in Arte Povera. From the second half of the 1960s onwards the vocabulary of his work consists of elementary materials (wool, coal, gold, iron, stone, lead, coffee, wood, etc.), open flames, casts of statues, furniture and clothes, plants and living animals, as in the memorable exhibition of twelve horses at the L’Attico gallery in Rome in 1969. The use of non-traditional materials, as well as music or performance, allows Kounellis to go beyond the limits of sculpture, expanding it in space and time in installations conceived as visualisations of powerful flows of plastic and symbolic energy. With his eyes on both artistic and cultural tradition and the historical tragedies and utopias of the twentieth century, Kounellis’s work explored the anthropological and political dimensions of the experience of artistic creation The installation on display, “Untitled”, presented for the first time in Todi and then in London in 2014, is one of the last created by the artist. Enveloping the space, “tracks” made of iron beams are arranged on four walls. Large butcher knives with handles wrapped in newspaper poke out from the beams and black coats reduced to shreds, in turns, hang out at the end of the handles. In the centre of the space a single “column” raises other coat flaps.

Born in Italy in 1942, Anna Maria Maiolino moved with her family in 1954 to Venezuela and then to Brazil, to Rio de Janeiro, where she started studies at the School of Fine Arts in 1960. Here she meets artists such as Antonio Dias and Rubens Gerchman and comes into contact with exponents of the neo-concrete movement such as Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape, approaching their conception – expressed in Ferreira Gullar’s manifesto “Teoria do não-objeto”. This philosophy, together with her fascination for matter, has influenced the artist’s practice since the beginning in the late 1960s. Maiolino queries the interaction between spectator and work – usually with a markedly bodily appearance as can also be seen in one of her later works, “7 + 1, serie Objeto Escultórico” (1999) – and the interaction between different means of expression, an interaction that emerges clearly in the installation proposed here and designed specifically for this exhibition occasion. Maiolino simulates the mutilation of parts of her face (tongue, nose, eyes), while the triptych Entrevidas (1981-2000) documents the artist’s walk on an egg-covered road. Here the egg, a symbol of life and fertility, a fragile and ephemeral object, symbolises the precariousness of human life and culture, threatened by the military dictatorship (1964-1985) that pushed many artists to leave Brazil. Of particular importance is also the recent return to drawing, in the guise of “anthropomorphic signs” halfway between sculpture and graphics, as seen in Sem título, from the Marcas da Gota N series (2010), and Sem título, from the Interações series (2013).

Claudio Parmiggiani, one of the most internationally known Italian artists, chose to live the condition of “secluded”, that is, distant from the groups and trends that dominated the second half of the twentieth century, to the point of defining himself in one of his texts a “stylite”, a hermit figure. Since his debut in the mid-1960s, his work has reflected on the nature of images, their cultural roots and their emotional resonances, using a wide range of materials and media, from photography to casting, from fragment to imprint and assemblage. Recurring themes in Parmiggiani’s work are solitude, silence, memory, an attitude that reconciles the deepest spirituality and the most radical materialism. His shadow sculptures, as they have been defined, often evoke disappeared bodies and objects, always avoiding the pure intellectual game that most often accompanies the themes of absence and trace.

Painting, photography and film have been the three ways in which Mario Schifano’s research has always been expressed. Since the early 1960s, the artist has been one of the protagonists of “new figuration”, close to pop art, and a keen observer of the simulacra of mass society, rendered in fragmentary and impersonal forms on monochrome backgrounds that seem to recall cinema or television screens. From the 1970s onwards, the television reference becomes increasingly important, especially with “Paesaggi T.V.”, In the same period, dominated by the new postmodern sensibility, the reconciliation with painting led Schifano to create demanding works, often of considerable size, characterised by a rich chromatic matter and free, wild signs, similar to those of contemporary neo-expressionist currents. In the paintings exhibited here, originally presented in Rome in 1990, and partly damaged by fire in 1992, Schifano returns to meditate on the anesthetising power of television – at the same time fetish and personal obsession – focusing on constant exposure to an overdose of images increasingly emptied of meaning.