SPACES AS PLACES AS STAGES
ENRICO CASTELLANI, JANNIS KOUNELLIS, CHIARA LECCA
26 October - 20 December, 2023
SPACES AS PLACES AS STAGES
ENRICO CASTELLANI, JANNIS KOUNELLIS, CHIARA LECCA
26 October - 20 December, 2023
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Galleria Fumagalli presents the eighth and final installment of the exhibition series MY30YEARS – Coherency in Diversity.
Conceived by art historian Lóránd Hegyi for Galleria Fumagalli, the exhibition program pays homage to the thirty-year career of gallery owner Annamaria Maggi. Through the joint exhibition of the works of three artists followed or represented by the gallery, each exhibition invites the viewer to overcome traditional categorizations, to reread the works of established masters, to offer new dialogues and to reveal some hidden parallels between research and artistic orientations of different generations.
Spaces as Places as Stages intends to revisit the challenges and aesthetic perspectives materialized in the oeuvre of Enrico Castellani (Castelmassa, 1930 – Celleno 2017) and Jannis Kounellis (Piraeus, Greece, 1936 – Rome, 2017) in the context of re-defining space as a stage of happenings, as a place of imaginary actions, movements and changes.
This encounter is enriched by two works by Chiara Lecca (Modigliana, 1977), who interprets the transformation of space into a place of appearance of emotional and imaginary subjects, emphasizing certain dramatic and surrealistic expressions.
The surprising narrative richness and multi-layered complexity of Chiara Lecca’s oeuvre meet the formal purity and silent rigor of the sculptural status of the work of the two masters Enrico Castellani and Jannis Kounellis, who were protagonists of a radical rethinking of the artistic strategies in the early Sixties, and of the redefinition of the relationship between space and time, between material and immaterial realities, emotional and ideal spheres.
While Enrico Castellani intensifies the inner tension between sculptural realities and optical effects, expanding the latent dynamism of the visual structure in order to direct the imagination towards a virtual space that functions as a real place, Jannis Kounellis creates an extreme concentration of explosive, dramatic and cathartic energies, providing a stage-like place for confrontations and imaginary events of encounters and fights. In her personal stage, Chiara Lecca expands the ambivalent and unidentifiable character of her forms which come to life in the fields of fantasy, improbability and indefinability.
By confronting the works of the three artists in a form of provocative and liberating dialogue, new areas of critical rethinking of the historically established categories of art get their chance for free development. The questioning of the categorizations of the “Great Masters” such as Enrico Castellani and Jannis Kounellis opens the way of a creative and subversive revisiting of the art examples of the Sixties, Seventies, Eighties and, at the same time, reveals new possible parallels and unintentional exchanges between different intellectual approaches towards the world.
Text
Galleria Fumagalli presents the eighth and final installment of the exhibition series MY30YEARS – Coherency in Diversity.
Conceived by art historian Lóránd Hegyi for Galleria Fumagalli, the exhibition program pays homage to the thirty-year career of gallery owner Annamaria Maggi. Through the joint exhibition of the works of three artists followed or represented by the gallery, each exhibition invites the viewer to overcome traditional categorizations, to reread the works of established masters, to offer new dialogues and to reveal some hidden parallels between research and artistic orientations of different generations.
Spaces as Places as Stages intends to revisit the challenges and aesthetic perspectives materialized in the oeuvre of Enrico Castellani (Castelmassa, 1930 – Celleno 2017) and Jannis Kounellis (Piraeus, Greece, 1936 – Rome, 2017) in the context of re-defining space as a stage of happenings, as a place of imaginary actions, movements and changes.
This encounter is enriched by two works by Chiara Lecca (Modigliana, 1977), who interprets the transformation of space into a place of appearance of emotional and imaginary subjects, emphasizing certain dramatic and surrealistic expressions.
The surprising narrative richness and multi-layered complexity of Chiara Lecca’s oeuvre meet the formal purity and silent rigor of the sculptural status of the work of the two masters Enrico Castellani and Jannis Kounellis, who were protagonists of a radical rethinking of the artistic strategies in the early Sixties, and of the redefinition of the relationship between space and time, between material and immaterial realities, emotional and ideal spheres.
While Enrico Castellani intensifies the inner tension between sculptural realities and optical effects, expanding the latent dynamism of the visual structure in order to direct the imagination towards a virtual space that functions as a real place, Jannis Kounellis creates an extreme concentration of explosive, dramatic and cathartic energies, providing a stage-like place for confrontations and imaginary events of encounters and fights. In her personal stage, Chiara Lecca expands the ambivalent and unidentifiable character of her forms which come to life in the fields of fantasy, improbability and indefinability.
By confronting the works of the three artists in a form of provocative and liberating dialogue, new areas of critical rethinking of the historically established categories of art get their chance for free development. The questioning of the categorizations of the “Great Masters” such as Enrico Castellani and Jannis Kounellis opens the way of a creative and subversive revisiting of the art examples of the Sixties, Seventies, Eighties and, at the same time, reveals new possible parallels and unintentional exchanges between different intellectual approaches towards the world.
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