Africa, telling A World proposes the works of 33 artists from the principal cultural areas of Sub-Saharan Africa. Contemporary African art – fuelled by the relations between pre-existing populations and immigrants of various origins, by the blend of religions, cultures, urban tribes, genres, ethnic groups and by the close relationship between nature, traditions and rituals – mirrors the depth of its own roots. Today it exhibits a strong impetus for research, knowledge and the phenomenological understanding of the core historical-religious and ethnical-anthropological problems that the continent faces. Text in English and Italian.
Alain Grosajt explores the question of trace and writing as an insatiable archaeologist. Writing, collage, scratching, dripping, engraving, drawing, painting, are all plastic means experienced for try to make this trace visible. His work runs in series, each dealing with a country, a religion, of a work or of a time, trying to trace the contours of a presence by through the variations obtained.
Text in English and French.
The first previously unpublished series of photographs – Residents of New York – was produced in the artist’s hometown in 2014 and the second – Denizens of Brussels – in March 2015 in close cooperation with the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts during preparations for Serrano’s retrospective in Brussels, when he walked the streets of the capital for ten nights to encounter the most marginal of its inhabitants. With his unique vision, making no judgements and conveying no political message (a point he insists on), he presents men and women generally invisible to passersby, forcing us by the sheer power of his photographs to see these urban residents. The text is by Michel Draguet, and Andres Serrano himself talks about his approach, the two series and the specific qualities of each. Text in English, French and Dutch.
Painters and alchemists alike strive to transform reality into its highest expression. Thus Andy Warhol can truly be seen as a modern alchemist – capable, by means of his art, of transforming matter into shape as it meets colour and surface, only to merge with light and supreme beauty. This volume retraces the creative universe of the Father of Pop Art through 140 works of art: masterpieces ranging from his most famous icons – Jackie and John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe – to a critical observation of contemporary society via the serial reproduction of consumer products and the analysis of other aspects of daily life such as
music or the sexual revolution.
Text in English and Italian.
The book tells the story of Arredoluce. The company produced lamps and furnishing accessories which, in the post-war industrial boom, helped to write the history of Made in Italy .
Arredoluce was born in 1943 in Monza, and was heavily influenced by the entrepreneur and designer Angelo Lelii. Arredoluce’s curiosity for innovations from abroad, combined with a love for traditional materials – above all, glass – and a maniacal attention to detail marked the production line of the company, producing modern and sought-after specimens.
Arredoluce is best remembered for his numerous participations at the Triennale di Milano, his quotes on Domus, and collaborations with designers such as Gio Ponti and Ettore Sottsass Jr. He also enjoyed great success abroad, with orders from luxury hotels the world over. The company, however, underwent generational changes, and this combined with the new economic scenarios, led to its closure in the 1990s.
This volume offers an important contribution to perpetuating the name of this glorious company, and ensuring it has its rightful place in the history of Italian industry.
Text in English and Italian.
During the Festival of Nouveau Réalisme (New Realism) in Milan in November 1970, Christo removed the white cloth in which he had wrapped the Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II in the Piazza del Duomo and placed it over the Monument to Leonardo da Vinci in the Piazza della Scala. This is viewed today as a key event in the contemporary art scene in Milan, a moment that Luigi and Peppino Agrati experienced live. They immediately contacted the artist and commissioned him to create works for the garden of their villa. Wealthy entrepreneurs, the Agrati brothers shared subtle and sensitive insights into art that fostered a deep understanding of the images that shaped their era. This show is the first time their collection is being revealed to the public, through a representative selection of Italian and American works of art donated with generosity and foresight by Luigi Agrati to the Intesa Sanpaolo. From a nucleus of sculptures by Melotti to masterpieces by Fontana, Burri, and Klein, the exhibition provides an in-depth examination of Italian ‘Nuova Figurazione’ painting (‘New Figurative Painting’), working its way to the roots of the new ‘Arte Povera’ (‘Poor Art’). The discovery of American art coincides with the Agratis’ acquisition of works by the principal exponents of Pop Art – including the iconic Andy Warhol and his monumental Triple Elvis – and by the Minimalists, of which Dan Flavin’s large neon work dedicated to Peppino Agrati is emblematic. In a kind of multiple constellation side by side with examples of Italian art, the collection reveals extraordinary works by Robert Rauschenberg (acquired in large numbers from the end of the 1960s to the 1980s), Cy Twombly (the original mediator between American and Italian art), and conceptual artists like Bruce Nauman and Joseph Kosuth, whose experiments with language are displayed in a dialogue with those by Alighiero Boetti and Vincenzo Agnetti.
Through frames, documents, publicity materials, texts, original screenplays, extracts from interviews, letters and declarations, this book traces the fundamental stages of Neorealism and puts the spotlight back on that unrepeatable moment which still fascinates and moves us today, capturing the reflection of what we were and the presage of what we were to become. Text in English and Italian.
The Corbella company, ‘the first Italian manufacturer of jewellery and weapons for the theatre’, was founded in the heart of Milan in 1865. Through reproductions of weapons, jewels and accessories, it soon became one of the first official suppliers of the Teatro alla Scala, as well as signing contracts with prestigious institutions including La Fenice di Venezia, the Costanzi in Rome and the Colón of Buenos Aires. The industrious Milan after the Unification of Italy, of the National and International Expositions, of the years between the two world wars and of the economic boom has seen the owners of Corbella always acting as protagonists, first in the theatrical sector, with specific supplies to the great lyrical interpreters, from Margherita Carosio to Renata Tebaldi, then in the field of the great Italian producers of costume jewellery, up to the production changes due to the globalisation of the 21st century.
Text in English and Italian.
The texts and interview included in this catalogue shed new light on Cybèle Varela’s contribution to Latin American and international artistic discourses, including Pop Art, Narrative Figuration and Video Art. Questions of identity, social and political issues and transnational experiences are central to Varela’s multifaceted production, from the 1960s to the present day. Text in English, German and Portuguese.
The works presented – Italian, but also European and American, dating from the end of the First World War to 1929 – are the expression of well-known artists who marked the history of Italian ceramics at the beginning of the century, and are of absolute international importance. Domenico Rambelli, Francesco Nonni, Pietro Melandri, Riccardo Gatti, Giovanni Guerrini, to mention some of the best-known names. Text in English and Italian.
Dia Al-Azzawi’s work, long celebrated for its vibrant 13 colour and vivacious style, came in on the tail winds of the early Pioneers movement in Iraq that arose in the mid-twentieth century and flourished in the 1940s-1960s. Al-Azzawi, some decades younger than the Pioneers and the related Baghdad Group for Modern Art, followed in their impressive and ground-breaking footsteps, emerging as a significant artist in his own right in the 1960s. The last quarter of the twentieth century and the works of the next generation of artists that developed, especially in the era of the international embargo against Iraq and the US-UK war of 2003 and its aftermath, were heavily represented in Al-Azzawi’s work, and his persistent references to the Mesopotamian past. In these works, and in his practices, this past had a tenacious continuity that he saw as part of the Iraqi present, co-existing with it rather than merely quoted and referenced within a separate modern world of art. In Al-Azzawi’s recent work, the utilisation of the past becomes a strong political statement against war and occupation, against the destruction of his ancient land.
Frédéric Borel graduated from the Special School of Architecture in 1982, and afterwards became laureate of the PAN XIII, of Albums de la jeune architecture and the villa Medici horsles-murs. Established in Paris since 1985, Frédéric Borel has developed a new approach to the urban question, through some emblematic buildings of a new architectural expressiveness.
Text in English and French.
This book traces the history of tin boxes in Italy from their origins to their spread across the various industry sectors. We present a selection of over 500 boxes produced between 1885 and the post-war period. Alongside anonymous designers whose decorations draw on the most diverse sources for inspiration and references, we find the names of great poster artists such as Cappiello, Mauzan, Dudovich, Golia and Sepo, who transpose their creations onto the surface of tins, marking the early history of this style of product packaging.
Text in English and Italian.
When Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec moved to Paris, he soon became a real chronicler of Parisian life. He was a painter who captured the exhilarating society of le demi-monde and its establishments: racecourses, circus tents, theatres and opera houses, cabarets and brothels that became his ateliers.
In only ten years, up to his death in 1901, he produced 368 prints and litograph posters, which he considered of equal importance to his paintings and drawings. When Toulouse-Lautrec started to experiment with lithography, his contemporaries, well-known artists like Alfons Mucha and Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen did so as well, and they too succeeded in creating true masterpieces. During their lifetimes, and because of their work, lithographs and posters were elevated from the status of mere mass advertising media to an accepted artistic genre.
Text in English and Italian.
The illustrated stories published in the Christmas issues of the youth magazines have left lasting memories with Finnish children. Translated in French for the first time, these charming stories take us into landscapes of forests and lakes, squirrels and tits, leprechauns and trolls – more facetious than worrisome.
Text in French.
In her latest work, Aisha in Wonderland, artist Maïmouna Guerresi invites viewers – through the languages of photography, video and installation – to enter an inner, hidden universe. An excuse to portray moods, feelings and existential thoughts on an incessant quest to find oneself and a new identity. Maïmouna Guerresi is an Italian-Senegalese multi-media artist working with photography, sculpture, video and installation. Her work presents an intimate perspective on the spiritual ideas of human beings in relation to their inner mystical dimensions. Maïmouna’s images become an appreciation of a shared humanity beyond psychological, cultural and political boundaries. The hybrid embrace of her work towards the spirituality and ancestry of African, Asian and European cultures mirrors her own embrace of globalisation in art and life. Recurring metaphors – milk, light, the hijab, trees and contrasting black and white – create an awareness of the vital unifying qualities of Islamic spirituality. The figures and scenes presented by the artist take on a new light – that of a universal truth about community and the soul – wherein the person becomes a sacred dwelling, or a meeting place for humanity to rediscover our shared mystical body.
Text in English and Spanish, with texts in Italian and Catalan in the appendix.
Enrico Coveri was to Andy Warhol what Francesco Martini Coveri is to Maurizio Galimberti. Complicity with a very high rate of creativity. Unlike Warhol, Maurizio Galimberti never had a chance to meet Enrico. But, he’s meeting him today, thanks to Francesco’s powerful intuition, in a remake of the creative universe through that unmistakable language, which propelled Galimberti to reach the world’s top in photography.
Text in English and Italian.
A one-of-a-kind work in the history of photography, for its technique and difficulty, begun in 2010 and continued even after the earthquake of 2016. Text in English, Italian and French.
Published to accompany an exhibition in 2014, curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath of Art Reoriented, the book’s premise builds on the artist’s topical work Turbulence (2012), a 4 x 4 metre square composed of thousands of glass marbles laid directly onto the floor. Placed exactly at the centre of the exhibition, this installation lies at the heart of a linear but non-chronological trajectory whereby a number of unexpected juxtapositions echo the complexity through which the artist (Beirut, Lebanon, 1952) has managed to challenge, and at times disturb, our experience of the ordinary. The choice of the notion of turbulence as a conceptual framework for the exhibition is derived from the thematic and formal dichotomies inherent within the artist’s work. These render it familiar yet perplexing, allowing for an intense aesthetic experience that is both inviting yet impenetrable, or, in other words, turbulent. Text in English and Arabic.
Considering the activity of the numerous foundations that contributed in spreading new expressive languages, today appears to be a fundamental operation in view of an interpretative widening of art history. Starting from this consideration, this publication – in two volumes – traces the path of the Murray and Isabella Rayburn Foundation, established in New York in 1982 with the aim of promoting Italian art in the United States.
‘Paparazzi’ is a photographic and cultural phenomenon born during the years in which Rome was considered ‘Hollywood on the Tiber River’. The 120 images portray the features of the protagonists of that season – especially the divas and stars of the silver screen, in addition to the photographs illustrating the wild nights in Via Veneto between the 1950s and 1960s. Photos by Tazio Secchiaroli, Marcello Geppetti, Elio Sorci, Ron Galella and many other prominent figures of the time make up (together with pages out of the magazines in which they were published) a fresco of popular communication from back then. Once the heroic season of paparazzi came to an end, that language became a sort of code used in different artistic and commercial contexts, as demonstrated in the final part of the volume by the images of the leading names in today’s photography scene such as Alison Jackson, Armin Linke and Ellen von Unwerth. Text in English and Italian.
These pages are intended as a compact up-to-date guide for readers wishing to find out more about one of the greatest artistic geniuses of all times, an artist epitomising the highest ideals of the age of Humanism whose complex personality challenges even the experts in this field of studies.