Opening 8 Feb. 6.30PM
Via Santa Croce 21, 20122 Milano
ABC-ARTE celebrates on of the most important Italian artists, Mario Schifano, in an in-depth and exhaustive survey of his photographs and paintings.
Through a nucleus of 29 monochromes on paper and rare slides and photographs, the exhibition set up by ABC-ARTE in its historical headquarters in Genoa with an autonomous appendix in the Milan venue, ABC- ARTE ONE OF, takes viewers on a totalizing journey.
The route in the Milanese gallery will be more intimate and introductory, while in the Genoese gallery visitors will have the opportunity to immerse themselves completely in the work of the artist with a wider selection of works.
The inauguration in Milano will be on Thursday 8 February.
"I would like to take you to a street near Piazza del Popolo to see the crosswalks. There I thought of doing the monochrome paintings. For me everything started at that moment."
So begins the story of Mario Schifano, from the vision of reality brought inside his work. The everyday and real life enter and become protagonists of his work. He does not omit the lived experience rather he enhances it and makes it the main actor of his being an artist. The title of the exhibition imprints the sense of becoming in his work through the capture of images, whether static or in motion.
After all, the nickname given to him by Parise, the Puma, defined well one of the great qualities of this extraordinary artist: his feline and feral agility in capturing the moment of life.
His traveling companion from the beginning is the camera, in 6x6 and 35 mm versions, then also the polaroid. The screen vision understood as a structural and conceptual element became essential in Mario Schifano's painting, and cinema as another paradigm also assumed its relevance.
In the decade of the 1960s Schifano made his three American trips; upon his arrival in New York in 1963 he was struck by the billboards, black, about the death of John F. Kennedy and photographed them; as he photographed the city with perspectives of all kinds, with cuts and shots reflecting an unstoppable visual voracity. Going on the road, traveling, seeing, knowing, spurs him to a new sensibility, ranging from picture- window to picture-screen.
Monochromes are created with large swathes of color, uniform, aggregated and disaggregated by an enamel layering that drips and shatters the edge of the screen. The photographic image becomes a visual surface, images of the street, of life, could be projected and received on these surfaces. Maurizio Fagiolo dell'Arco, among the sharpest interpreters of Schifano's work wrote: "Schifano's weapon is the régard, an eye-lens, a mental camera. He does not see a thing but sees it 'framed,' he sees it 'angled,' that is, he considers the world-of-life behind a screen, which is objective but ends up giving an 'abstract' imprint to the latest mundane fragments."
Photographic images become over time visionary aggregations, testimonies of unrepeatable moments that have become mythical, montages and superimpositions of subjects and sensations. One perceives from them an "eagerness to burn stages," "that rapacious running through the things of the world," "exceptional quality of instinctively aiming at the right targets".
The exhibition will feature alternating monochromatic surfaces, the result of a moment in the 1970s of reworking his subjects with an aptitude for self-quotation, i.e. the conceptual space of his work, a selection of Mario Schifano's endless photographic production, concentrated here between 1963 and 1970, the year of his on-the-road trip to America with Nancy Ruspoli. This extraordinary collection is the photographic collection of Rinaldo Rossi, Mario Schifano's friend and associate, of whom the artist said "...after all, he is worse than me!".
The exhibition was made possible by the valuable collaboration of the Mario Schifano Archive, established in 2003 by Monica De Bei Schifano and Marco Giuseppe Schifano.
A bilingual publication, ABC-ARTE editions, will be produced with authorial texts and a rich documentary apparatus.
