Expositions
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.
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