Summer exhibitions
MAN, Museo d’Arte Provincia di Nuoro
Via Sebastiano Satta 27
08100 Nuoro
Sardinia
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 10am–1pm/3–8pm
T +39 0784 252110
Maria Lai: Sewing the World
July 11–October 12, 2014
Ricucire il mondo (Sewing the World) pays homage to Maria Lai (1919–2013), one of the most gifted and significant Italian women artists of the second half of the 20th century. The exhibition follows a chronological and thematic itinerary across three different venues: Cagliari’s Palazzo di Città, Nuoro’s Museum of Art (MAN) and the Stazione dell’Arte in Ulassai, the artist’s birthplace. With more than three hundred works from public and private collections, including that of Lai’s family, this is her first complete retrospective exhibition. The section at the MAN, curated by Barbara Casavecchia and Lorenzo Giusti, is devoted to Lai’s works after the 1980s, an intensely creative period, when the artist went public with pioneering performative and relational practices. The exhibition opens with Legarsi alla montagna (Binding Oneself to the Mountain, 1981), Lai’s first group action in Ulassai, and follows the main stages of her public projects through artworks, documentary materials, photographs and videos, weaving them together with Lai’s parallel work in the field of theatre. Another key element of the exhibition—which also includes a series of signature works, such as the Lenzuoli (Sheets), Libri cuciti (Sewn Books), Geografie (Geographies) and Telai (Looms)—is Lai’s relationship with the world of childhood and pedagogy, which she explored in her production of fables, books, games and workshops, aimed at involving children and adults in a reflection on art’s liberating potential.
Paolo Chiasera: The Gardens of Sardinia, Cyprus and Jerusalem
July 11–October 12, 2014
Paolo Chiasera’s project, which involves Nuoro’s MAN and the De Vleeshal Centre of Visual Arts of Middelburg (Netherlands), is a continuation of the itinerary undertaken by the artist in 2011 with the elaboration of the concept of “exhibition painting,” a genre he invented which is characterized by the creation of exhibitions on canvas, conceived as a place for meetings and exchanges of ideas among artists, curators and institutions. Starting from the emotions provoked by a visit to the gardens of the 18th-century Villa d’Orri (Sarroch, Sardinia) and the atmosphere of the Augustan Villa of Livia (Rome), Paolo Chiasera created an evocative nocturnal garden on canvas. Inside it, together with the curator Micaela Deiana, he displays a selection of works from the MAN collection.
Antonio Rovaldi: Horizon in Italy
July 3–August 31, 2014
At Gavoi (in the province of Nuoro), MAN presents Orizzonte in Italia, a work by Antonio Rovaldi resulting from his bicycle tour following Italy’s coastline in 2011, and composed of a series of 148 photographs of the horizon line. The exhibition represents the first part of a project in two stages. The next step will take place at MAN’s venue in Nuoro, in February of 2015, to mark the end of a new bicycle journey undertaken by the artist around the coastline of Sardinia. During the experience of the trip as well as in the photographic installation that translates it, the empty spaces between one horizon and the following one are akin to moments of emptiness and suspension, physical pauses for a rest that seems to catch the sinuous coastline in a single glance, momentarily overcoming the partiality of our vision of landscape.
