Vettor Pisani
Eroica / Antieroica. Una retrospettiva (Heroic/Antiheroic. A retrospective)
December 21, 2013–March 24, 2014
Pádraig Timoney
A lu tiempo de… (At the time of…)
February 7–May 12, 2014
Museo d’arte contemporanea Donnaregina – Madre, Napoli
Via Settembrini 79
80139 Naples
Italy
The Madre museum presents the retrospective and mid-career solo exhibitions of Vettor Pisani and Pádraig Timoney.
Eroica/Antieroica. Una retrospettiva (Heroic/Antiheroic. A retrospective) is the first and most comprehensive retrospective ever devoted to Vettor Pisani (Bari, 1934–Rome, 2011). With his first solo exhibition in 1970 at the Galleria La Salita in Rome (Maschile, Femminile e Androgino – Incesto e Cannibalismo in Marcel Duchamp), and then with his participation in some of the most important exhibitions of the 1970s and 1980s, including Vitalità del negativo nell’arte italiana 1960–70 (1970), Documenta V (1972), Contemporanea (1973–1974), International Performance Week at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (1977) and his eight participations in the Venice Biennale from 1972 to 1995, Pisani gradually emerged as one of the most important exponents of artistic research in Italy, due to his distinctive narrative-based practice, as well as one of the most personal and visionary authors of his generation. His figure appears today as radically contemporary, that of a true precursor who successfully combined conceptual investigation with ironic understatement, the play of language with role playing, masking with the search for truth, History with the everyday, the sacred with the profane, the quotation from the past with its embodiment in the present. All Pisani’s works are theatrical representations of the human knowledge located systematically beyond the boundaries that separate disciplines such as art, literature, theater, music, architecture, philosophy, poetry, science (including the occult sciences), even moving beyond the very idea of the artist as a singular and uniform figure. The exhibition retrace the artist’s whole output grouping site-specific installations, mixed media works, drawings and collages, paintings on canvas and PVC, re-enactments of performative actions, accompanied by an essential complement of photographic and filmic documentary materials. A twin exhibition will be on view from January 27 to March 30 at the Teatro Margherita, Bari and the first survey monograph devoted to the artist will be published in 2014 by Electa, to accompany both exhibitions.
Curated by Andrea Viliani, Eugenio Viola. Curatorial Advisor: Laura Cherubini
A lu tiempo de… (At the time of…) is the largest solo show ever devoted to the Irish artist Pádraig Timoney (b. 1968, Derry) in a public institution. This mid-career survey—comprising more than fifty works created over the last twenty years—also marks the artist’s symbolic return to Naples, the artist’s place of residence and production from 2004 to 2011. Timoney pays homage to Naples starting with the title of the show, which cites the opening words of ‘O Cunto ‘E Masaniello, a song published in 1974 by the Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare. Timoney’s work is a deep and personal exploration of all the languages of painting and the nature of images, created with different means of expression: in addition to the main medium of painting, the artist makes use of photography, sculpture and installation, creating a visual universe marked by a radical eclecticism. In front of a series of works by Timoney, you may have the impression of being in a group exhibition, the styles, techniques and moods that define his work are that different: abstraction coexists with the most faithful photorealism, movement is accompanied by an almost meditative aesthetic, while a scholarly relationship with the history of art is combined with an understanding of the more contemporary, even trivial, aspects of our globalized and digital culture. This apparent incongruity of shapes and languages corresponds, in fact, to a rigorous and fully deliberate artistic strategy, at the heart of which we find a critique of the notion of “style” as the desire to explore art in all its aesthetic and conceptual potential. The photographic nature of much of Timoney’s experimentation with materials and media clearly shows a link to the work of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, while Timoney’s interest in processes and materials, interpreted in their organic, temporal and changeable nature, finds an echo in European Informal and American Minimalist painting, and finally the ambiguity pursued among image and language evokes the surrealist tradition, as the visual and linguistic paradoxes of René Magritte, Max Ernst’s enigmatic quality of materials and shapes, the supreme illusion of Étant donnés by Marcel Duchamp. The exhibition will be accompanied by the first extensive monograph on the artist, published by Electa and edited by Alessandro Rabottini, with critical essays by Gavin Delahunty and Dominic Molon.
Curated by Alessandro Rabottini
