events

29.09.2022 - 10.12.2022

STRAY IMAGES

You are here: Tommaso Calabro

Art+Design

5vie selection

physical event

Info

Tommaso Calabro

Piazza San Sepolcro, 2

hours

11.00 - 19.00

Sicilian sculptor Pietro Consagra (1920-2005) was one of the great protagonists of Italian art after World War II. A pioneer of the renewal of abstract sculpture, starting in the 1960s Consagra freed the latter from superstructures and preconceptions in favor of a direct encounter between work and viewer. 

This exhibition stems from curator Paola Nicolin's research on a specific body of Consagra's works better known as Lenzuoli, paintings with washable colors made by the artist on cotton fabrics starting in 1967. In this still little-known series came insights and changes of direction that, in parallel with the fine-tuning of a practical and theoretical discourse on the theme of thickness in sculpture, led the artist to find in painting a free and liberating field of experimentation; almost an unconscious flow of "wandering images"-as he himself wrote in 1974 in the introductory text to the exhibition "Variations by Pietro Consagra. Four hand-painted sheets," at the Multicenter gallery in Milan - which were a counterbalance to his radical choice of frontal sculpture.

It was in a Milan exhibition, at Beatrice Monti's Galleria dell'Ariete in 1967, that this change in sensibility was felt by Carla Lonzi, who followed Consagra to America and likened his Suspended Planes, Transparent Irons and Aluminum Planes to "paintings hanging on the walls." In the exhibition, a selection of these works is added to examples of Giardini, Inventari, Sottilissime, Mobili bifrontali, Paracarri, and Controluce - made between 1965 and the 1990s - proposing an intimate, personal and emotional journey into Pietro Consagra's domestic universe, face to face with the visitor.