UROBOROS
James Lee Byars encounters
Leon Battista Alberti
Until November 8, 2014
Marino Marini Museum
Piazza San Pancrazio
Florence
Italy
Hours: Monday, Wednesday–Saturday 10am–5pm
info [at] museomarinomarini.it
The Marino Marini Museum is honoured to present URUBOROS: James Lee Byars encounters Leon Battista Alberti. Curated by the museum’s artistic director Alberto Salvadori, this unique project involves Leon Battista Alberti’s Rucellai Chapel and Sepulchre, reopened to the public in 2013, which it places in an unprecedented dialogue with a work of contemporary art by the US-born artist James Lee Byars.
The Uroboros (from the Greek οὐροβόρος, tail-devouring snake) denotes the figure of a snake biting its own tail, endlessly catching up with itself and recreating itself to form a perfect circle. The symbol of the Uroboros is associated with Gnosticism, hermeticism, and alchemy. Representing the dualistic nature of all things, it illustrates the idea that opposites are not in conflict with each other, but contribute together to the development of spiritual harmony.
Leon Battista Alberti was one of the Renaissance’s most sophisticated intellectuals. In Ouroboro Poietico, Gabriele Morolli called his Rucellai Sepulchre ”an object that can generate spiritual creativity. In the sepulchre we see a perfect conceptual mechanism that embodies both material pursuits––linked to the archaeological/antiquarian culture of the Renaissance’s great artists––and spiritual pursuits that can be traced back to fifteenth-century Florentine Neoplatonic culture with its esoteric inflection.” If one were to look for a contemporary artist whose works share these traits, one would certainly have to consider James Lee Byars (Detroit, 1932–Cairo, 1997), an artist who successfully escaped classification, wishing to remain free to reunite the opposites within himself––yin and yang, black and white, day and night––by turning them into complementary parts of a single thought.
Their refusal to be categorised as well as the spiritual and intellectual dimension of their work explains why Alberti and Byars, albeit in different eras and contexts, held original and independent positions, eluding all traditional frames of reference and choosing as the main goal of their pursuit to elevate the intellect into a means to achieve transcendence. Despite the centuries separating them, their interest in astrology, astronomy, mathematics, and intellectual syncretism brought them in contact with other, faraway cultures. For both, the flow of the cosmos shaped forms and concepts; their objects and decorations can therefore be read as talismans of authentic power capable of capturing divine and astral influences. Alberti’s conception illustrates how the focus shifted from Plato’s iconoclasm to the image as a reflection of divine beauty and how the Renaissance healed the breach between reality and invention with the rules of composition and perspective.
This is the backdrop on which The Head of Plato, modelled by Byars as a perfect sphere, comes into its own. This sculpture in white marble belongs to a body of work in which the American artist indulges in his primary passion for philosophical questions. Through Renaissance and Classicism in Alberti’s work, and through Minimalism in Byars’s, the individuality of the artist as someone who impregnates his own creations with the concept of order and meaning manifests itself in their encounter and dialogue. A Neoplatonic element connects the work of both artists across the centuries: a poetic centred on light, whether cast directly by the sun or reflected by the moon, by precious, purest white marble (from Greece in the case of Byars, from Carrara in that of Alberti), and by precious metals.
Thanks to Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London
Until 26 June, the crypt of the Marino Marini Museum is also presenting Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade’s installation Looking for Jesus. The display is part of Late One Morning, an exhibition curated by Alberto Salvadori and Luigi Fassi and dedicated to the possible experiences and ways of interpreting and conceiving sculpture today.
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