ART CITIES:Milan-Recto Verso at Fondazione Prada

All artists know that someone will see the back of their work. The exhibition “Recto Verso” presents artworks that consciously foreground the hidden, concealed or forgotten phenomenon of “The back”. The exhibition continues an approach from the preceding Nord gallery exhibition “In Part”, whereby a latent theme is detected in the Prada Collection, and then expanded with loaned works from international and national institutions.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Fondazione Prada Archive

Western art tradition has mainly conceived of paintings as frontal (“recto”) artifacts. The back (“verso”) carries significantly less cultural meaning, destined to be beyond the public’s perception, and only visible to the artists themselves or staff at museums and galleries. The core concept of “Recto Verso” is the dualism between the front and the back of the artwork. The marks that the artists leave on the back of a painting can be diverse in nature and their intentional revelation of non-visible content can vary: from the explicit message of protest shown by Gastone Novelli during the 1968 Venice Biennale, when he exhibited one of his paintings reversed, like a wall on which political slogans could be written, to the inclusion of actual images on the back of the canvas, as can be seen in the works of Llyn Foulkes and Giulio Paolini. These only become visible when they are turned around. In other works, cryptic messages are stowed away in the back, waiting to be acknowledged.
 Artists from different generations and genres turn a simple gesture into a rich historical examination of truth, illusion and ways of seeing. Carla Accardi replaces canvas with transparent plastic, thus revealing the otherwise hidden structure and the wall behind, in recent years Pierre Toby has used glass for the same purpose. In the works of Pierre Buraglio and Daniel Dezeuze the picture plane vanished completely, leaving only the support material. Among others are on exhibition works of: Carla Accardi, Louis-Léopold Boilly, Gerard Byrne, Sarah Charlesworth, Daniel Dezeuze, Llyn Foulkes, Philippe Gronon, Roy Lichtenstein, Matts Leiderstam, Gastone Novelli, Giulio Paolini, Alberto Burri, Ian Wallace, Thomas Demand & Pierre Toby.

Info: Curators: Shumon Basar, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Cédric Libert and Dieter Roelstraete, Fondazione Prada, Largo Isarco 2, Milan, Duration: 3/12/15-14/2/16, Days & Hours: Sun-Thu 11:00-19:00, Fri-Sat 11:00-22:00, www.fondazioneprada.org