Where and when
From
To
Museo Novecento
Altre sedi
100 works of contemporary art at the Forte di Belvedere and throughout the city. At the Museo Novecento, in the temporary exhibition room, works by Mario Merz, Alighiero Boetti and Gino De Dominicis are exhibited.
Ytalia is an exhibition that offers the national and international public the opportunity to meet some of the greatest Italian artists of our time: the exhibition project – promoted by the Municipality of Florence and organized by Mus.e – was born in collaboration with the Florentine Civic Museums and the Uffizi Galleries, the Opera di Santa Croce and the Marino Marini Museum.
Over one hundred works, exhibited at the Forte di Belvedere and in some of the symbolic places of our heritage: a real contemporary museum spread in the heart of the city between inside and outside, between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, between museums and gardens, funeral chapels and spaces of political life, galleries and studios, cloisters and crypts.
It is in this context that some of the works in the exhibition will be exhibited at the Museo Novecento, the “natural” location for this type of exhibition.
Alighiero Boetti (Turin, 1940 – Rome, 1994)
Eclectic and cosmopolitan, Alighiero Boetti – or Alighiero e Boetti as he signs himself starting in 1973 – made his debut on the Turin art scene in the mid-1960s, as part of the experimentation of the new conceptual avant-garde and Arte Povera.
In 1971, following an innate interest in intellectual nomadism and distant cultures, he visited Afghanistan and elected Kabul as his second homeland. There begins the production of the series of Maps: planispheres embroidered by Afghan women, in which each nation is represented by the colors of its flag.
Within the Maps, as well as in other cycles that accompany his artistic career (the compositions of letters, Biro, Alternando da one a hundred and vice versa …), Boetti develops the idea of collective creativity, open and processual, in which the artist designs the works but delegates the manual execution to third parties, who are guided by rules set by him. The mental aspect remains a priority within the artistic process, so most of his works combine formal beauty with a logical structuring, often based on the development of a real code or a reading system.
In his production – variable for materials, techniques and supports – Boetti tried to overcome the usual categorizations, starting from the very concept of identity. From the works on the double, such as the fake Gemelli self-portrait of 1968 (echo of “je est un autre” by Arthur Rimbaud), to the participatory works, Boetti undermines the idea of creative, cultural, linguistic and political unity.
Gino de Dominicis (Ancona 1947 – Rome 1998)
“Gino de Dominicis, painter, sculptor, architect, Ancona 1947. His work is characterized by a dependence on the various artistic currents that have followed one another from the post-war period to today. He exhibited his works for the first time in 1966 and later in some exhibitions in Italy and abroad. Due to his choice, there are no catalogs or books on his work. He does not grant photography any value as a document or as a publicity vehicle for his works “(from the biographical card that the artist sent for the 1997 Venice Biennale). A complex and radical personality, de Dominicis is one of the most emblematic and mysterious figures of contemporary Italian art. It established itself at the end of the 1960s with a practice that involves multiple expressive techniques and refuses to fit into a precise historical-artistic current. With a disturbing irony that makes use of quotation and appropriation, the artist subtly polemics with the art of his time. His research is rooted in history (as in the recovery of the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh) and brings into play a reflection on existential issues such as the enigma of life and death. In the ideal attempt to stop the irreversibility of time, the works live in the ambivalence between contingency and spirituality and recover the strength of illusion, as when they set out to achieve impossible goals: immortality, invisibility or the Attempt to make forming squares instead of circles around a stone that falls into the water (work of ’71). Starting from the 1980s, de Dominicis devoted himself to painting, creating canvases dominated by hermetic figures: “drawing, painting, sculpture are not traditional forms of expression, but original, therefore also of the future”.
Mario Merz (Milan ,1925 – Turin, 2003)
Merz approaches the art scene as a self-taught artist in the mid-1950s practicing painting, after having abandoned his studies in medicine. Already in the 60s he made his first installations and at the end of the decade he was among the undisputed protagonists of Arte Povera, with a practice that focuses on the use of natural materials and the search for primary energies. He introduces in his works heterogeneous materials connected to the natural world (branches, leaves, fruit ..), animal (crocodiles, iguanas, lizards ..), everyday life (neon, umbrellas, tables …) and scientific (such as the Fibonacci numerical series) . His first works – sculptures made with common objects that interpenetrate – underline on the one hand his constant interest in accumulation and dynamism, on the other hand the presence of recurring themes linked to nature, to the physical and biological universe, to the space. In 1968 he created his first igloo (Igloo di Giap), introducing one of the distinctive features of his practice. Merz investigates the symbolic potential of this form of housing – primordial, common to Eastern and Western cultures, in balance between expansion and concentration -, transforming it into a metaphor for the relationship between nature, man and architecture. Starting from 1970 he begins to use in some works the numerical series of Leonardo Pisani, called Fibonacci – identified by the Tuscan mathematician in the Middle Ages, in which each number is the sum of the previous two (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13…) – within which it recognizes an alchemical relationship capable of representing the growth processes of the natural and organic world.