Expositions
This is the first time a group exhibition featuring works from Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo’s collection have been shown in Rome, presenting an important selection of Italian and International artists who have made the story of art from the Eighties up to today.
The fourth appointment of Macro Wall:Eighties are back! focuses on sculptor Vittorio Corsini (Cecina, Livorno, 1956). Vittorio Corsini’s work stems from a meditation on living space, which is analyzed considering its most intimate conceptual and poetic features, through a series of works in different materials, from rope to glass, from iron to plastic.
Twenty years ago, when digital media began to rise in importance, Benedetto Marcucci made the first book in oil. Now the artist presents at the MACRO - Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Roma - a project conceived in the nineties but never achieved: the Treccani in oil.
The new installation by Bik Van der Pol – a house with hundreds of butterflies inspired by Mies van der Rohe’s popular Farnsworth House – is the work chosen to inaugurate the new wing of the MACRO museum.
On the occasion of the International Rome Film Festival, on the fiftieth anniversary of La Dolce Vita and ninety years after the birth of Federico Fellini, the Film Library of Bologna pays tribute to the great master with an exhibition-event.
MACRO hosts two installations by Riccardo Benassi and Tomaso de Luca – the winners of the first edition of the 6ARTISTA prize – in confirmation of the constant attention of the Museum to the new generations of artists living or working in Rome.
The first exhibition in Italy of the British artist Antony Gormley, one of the most respected sculptors of the contemporary art scene.
An extraordinary audio-visual exhibition dedicated to one of the great protagonists of the documentary: guided by the words of Franco Simongini, visitors can see some of the greatest Italian artists of the twentieth century and listen to their voices.
Hiker Meat is the new project of the English artist Jamie Shovlin: a collaged film, consisting of over one thousand clips of found footage of a never released film, a memory of a past experience.
An amazing immersion into the heart of the creativity of Mario Schifano, one of the most innovative international artist of the second half of the twentieth century.
An extraordinary visual journey, through images, places, languages, cultures and the people who have lived in international and experimental milieu of Rome in the Sixties.
After Alfredo Pirri and Luigi Carboni, the series of exhibitions dedicated to the "art histories" of the 80s continues with Nunzio, one of the most original artist of the generation blossomed in those years and still a leading figure in the Italian and International scene.
Nico Vascellari, a young artist of international renown, presents “Blonde”, a project conceived for the curved walls of the Museum, that aims to give these transit areas a new life and new meanings.
The hall of the museum is transformed into a large sculpture that can be crossed, thanks to the space scanning proposed by Nicola Carrino: the artist has specifically created this work for the heart of the museum to welcome the visitor.
MACRO presents a new setting of its collection that aims at redefining the concepts of space, form and sign, marking a new nature of the universe that embraces figuration and mechanicness.
Third event of the "Roommates" series, a project that invites two young Roman (or working in Rome) artists to share the same exhibiting space and to dialogue with each other.
On display, for the first time, “Homines” by Mario Ballocco: disturbing, cruel and desperate, stylized entities, that embody the dynamics of anthropological and social aspects of our daily lives: falling in love, conflicts, submissiveness, betrayal, cultural and political commitment and much more.
MACRO - Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Roma - hosts in the hall two large works by the Italian artist Sergio Ragalzi that have recently became part of the collection of the Museum.
The new edition of FotoGrafia, Rome's international festival of photography, whose theme this year is FUTURSPECTIVES, or “can photography predict the future?”
The project MACROwall: Eighties are Back! wants to reinterpret Italian art of the Eighties thorough a cycle of exhibitions featuring 10 artists whose different researches have characterized the production of the decade. Each artist is invited to display on the same wall two of his most representative works, an “historical” one and a more recent one, in order to allow the public to rediscover the vitality of art forms in the last years. The works are accompanied by critical reviews coming from two different generations: the younger art critic will interpret the “historical” work and vice versa.
Renewables are the new frontier of the energy that does not pollute and that governments around the world are exploiting to curb carbon dioxide emissions which are harmful to humans and the environment.
In the evocative space of La Pelanda in MACRO Testaccio, Bernardo Siciliano presents Naked City, an exhibition curated by Maria Ida Gaeta and Lea Mattarella: on display large canvases of female nudes and small or medium sized paintings of New York, where the artist has been living for more than ten years.
The growth of the suburbs of Rome and its transformations emphasize the need for a critical approach in the perception of the urban dimension of the city.
The exhibition Past Forward Toward Future, curated by 3/3, and sponsored by the Comune di Roma, Assessorato alle Politiche Culturali e della Comunicazione - Sovraintendenza ai Beni Culturali, in the framework of Rome Architecture Festival – Index Urbis, takes in examination this dimension making a comparison between two projects by Joel Sternfeld, which retrieve suggestions from the past and the inspirations for the future of the city.
MACRO will dedicate one of its large galleries to a solo show from the young American artist Aaron Young (San Francisco, California, 1972), curated by Costanza Paissan. Called upon to create a site-specific installation, Young re-imagined the exhibition space by infusing it with urban ambience and exposing how the diverse stories and languages of a city can coexist.
The four videos in the show were shot in a variety of locations from the Palace of Versailles to a frozen lake in New York State. The camera is constantly being flipped upside down and kicked around by the artist until it is fully destroyed. The resulting footage creates a melange of sights and sounds, catching the viewer off-guard and upsetting his sense of space. One of the videos, created specially for this exhibition presents a liberal and disillusioned interpretation of Rome’s classical image and that of a symbolic monument, the Colosseum.
A great master of contemporary art, rethinks MACRO’s galleries, absorbing visitors into a complete physical and psychological experience pulsing with energy.
In a project specifically created for MACRO, Gilberto Zorio turns one of the Museum’s galleries into a huge work, fully involving visitors. As is so often the case, he has used signs and traces of unusual and diverse materials that are both unstable and unpredictable, in order to involve the identity of the space in constant modification. The result is a place laden with mystery and atavistic symbols, which are always elements of his investigations. These include the five-pointed star, a cosmic image he has made in a whole variety of materials in the past (terracotta, copper, leather, incandescent wire, laser beams, crystal, parchment, and oxy-hydrogen flame burns), which the artist introduces here as a huge horizontal sign. In its constant and sudden alternation of light and dark, it gives us a new experience, transforming our visual perception of space and symbols.
MACRO inaugurates the entrance to its new wing with a site specific installation by Jacob Hashimoto. Silence Still Governs Our Consciousness creates a floating realm which anticipates the journey from MACRO’s present to its future.
Hashimoto conceived this “cloud of 7000 kites” specifically for MACRO’s new exhibition gallery. The work fills the room like a “diaphanous canopy” evoking in its spectators the sensation of being “surrounded by a mist filled forest of kites and strings - a quiet, meditative, sculptural environment.” The piece synthesizes nature and technology to yield a fluid and organic landscape. This encourages meditation and evokes new readings of the gallery: as a void, as space, or as time.
On the second floor of the recently renovated via Reggio Emilia building, a bridge to the Museum’s new wing, is a solo show featuring the Portuguese artist João Louro. It is a world in which nothing is as it seems, a universe where the short-circuit of vision and language creates original expressive pathways.
One of the galleries of the Museum is home to My Dark Places, a solo show featuring the work of Portuguese artist João Louro (born in 1963 in Lisbon), curated by Luca Massimo Barbero. Works never seen before and specifically created for this show will be shown as part of Louro’s Blind Images series. The works are inspired by the seemingly antithetical concepts “fear” and “pleasure,” in addition to The Black Dahlia by James Elroy, and works of the Marquis de Sade. The text in the work, featuring phrases taken from textual sources, and the monochromatic scheme ironically and subtly interact with one another in a way that similar to labels or subtitles. The observer doesn’t find a simple explanation or description in the text, but new suggestions, that open the eyes and mind to different, faraway worlds, filled with philosophical and literary citations. A simple color scheme seems almost to condense its meaning and contain unexpected aspects within the text.
Micro, Aureo, Adela is the project MACRO commissioned from Spanish artist Jorge Peris (born in Alzira, Valencia, 1969). Specially realized for this space, the installation is the fruit of Peris recent work. Recreating the environment of a salt mine, Peris turns one of the Museum’s galleries into an extreme ecosystem. Exploring the relationship between salt and water, he brings his audience on a journey into the infinite past.
Jorge Peris consulted with physicists and marine biologists, in order to study the dynamics of the origins of life. The artificial ecosystem which resulted from this research is based on the memory of salt and accompanies the visitor on their journey into the past, according to the rhythms of the golden mean. The formation of the saline stalactites is governed by the Coriolis effect and creates a corridor of time-space continuum, a window onto our ancestral past. The Artemia Salinae are forms of primordial life that have maintained their original characteristics through the millennia, harking back to the origins of life on earth.
The MACRO SPECIAL PROJECTS program, begun in the summer of 2009, brings young artists the possibility of interacting with the Museum’s alternative gallery spaces. Artists such as Francesco Simeti and the Cuoghi Corsello duo took over the open-plan elevator shafts and semi-circular walls in the atrium bringing a new life and meaning to the spaces. The metamorphoses of these spaces continues with Luca Trevisani, breathing new life into Museum’s corridors.
An evolution of Gibbous and Waning, Trevisani’s work Space is a Garden to Cultivate, through its at once organic and artificial forms represents the lunar phases within cosmic space. The images evoke tidal rhythms, astral movements, stellar geometry, and the forces and entities which, determining times and seasons, govern human life. Interested by the influence the moon exerts on individuals, the artist uses industrial PVC surfaces on which he represents forms to evoke the gravitational pull on bodies. Two complimentary images face each other and dialogue in a game of attraction and repulsion, thus generating a celestial choreography based on complimentary, reciprocal, and multiplying points of view.
After the extraordinary response from our visitors, Rome, We Were the Avant-Garde will remain on view for the entirety of the summer exhibition season. This show has managed to cross the boundaries that traditionally divide generations and has opened dialogue with all types of public personalities. MACRO has decided to extend this show in a summer full of cultural activity because the memory of avant-garde Rome is relevant to the city’s interaction with the international community
MACROwall:Eighties are Back! is a project that revisits Italian art of the 1980s via a collection of ten artists who represent the diverse types of research that characterized the artistic production that occurred in the decade. Each artist was invited to feature two pieces, one recent work and one from the 80s. to allow the public to examine the evolution of the creative process over the years. Each piece is accompanied by commentary from two art critics who represent the generations during which each work was made, the younger critic providing an analysis of the older work and vice versa. The audience is given the opportunity to observe how the creative process evolves over time.
The first instalment of MACROwall: Eighties are Back! features Alfredo Pirri (born in Cosenza in 1957): author, painter, sculptor and installation artist. His works are born of the union between the figurative and the abstract, reality and fiction, elements that alternate and overlap to arrive at artistic expression through expression of purity of form. The seemingly minimalist work on display at MACRO highlights the link found between color and light. Visitors observe the intense dialogue between light and color as they play out on the same wall and then experience the charge of energy from the interchange.
MACRO continues to celebrate the avant-garde art and architecture of Rome by presenting again the show Oscar Savio: Architecture in Black and White during the summer exhibition program. The exhibition is being brought back as an editorial program, proposing a “treasure hunt” of sorts in the city, a race through stories and symbols that surprise the viewer and stimulate interest in the rediscovery of Rome.
MACRO is pleased to offer its visitors this special preview of the Museum’s new wing designed by Odile Decq, featuring a selection of artworks which will highlight the potential of these new spaces. This exceptional event will take place May 29 and 30: a weekend which will make of Rome a global capital of contemporary art.
Visitors will also be able to preview the exhibits in MACRO's Via Reggio Emilia galleries.
To reserve a free visit of MACRO please book on-line:
www.macroeventi.org
A great master of contemporary art, Daniel Buren conceived his first major permanent work in Rome for the museum while observing and exploring MACRO’s spaces. Imagined for the area known as the “belvedere,” Buren’s reflective work with its wonderful play of light and perspective will become a part of the museum’s future. It will participate a few months from now in the birth of the new wing designed by Odile Decq, while already “reflecting” its growth.
DigitaLife is an opportunity to offer a complex-free perspective on the future:without naivety but without solemnity. an assumed future.