Two new exhibitions at GAMeC
Pop, Realisms and Politics. Brazil – Argentina, 1960s
and
Giuseppe Gabellone
From 8 March 2013
Opening: Thursday, 7 March, 6:30pm
GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna
e Contemporanea di Bergamo
Via San Tomaso, 53
24121 Bergamo, Italy
Pop, Realisms and Politics. Brazil – Argentina, 1960s
8 March–26 May 2013
Curators: Paulo Herkenhoff and Rodrigo Alonso
The exhibition presents and analyses the artistic production of Brazil and Argentina during the sixties, highlighting the artists’ creativity and originality, as well as the challenges they faced in a decade of profound social changes.
The exhibition title contains a reference to the artistic movements that inspired the works on show and to the topics that are examined, first of all, English and American Pop Art and French Nouveau Réalisme, as well as Situationism, the Argentine Otra Figuración movement, and the Brazilian Nova Objetividade and Tropicália movements.
In the show, the icons of American Pop Art find an answer in the personal vision of this movement proposed by South American artists who understood that freedom of expression and the ability to grasp and co-opt the mass media were essential to ensure the development of culture and their own art. The works show many similarities, starting with their subjects: mass consumerism, advertising, design, fashion, and, above all, political resistance.
This is a dynamic, powerful and unconventional art which often sparked controversy and scandal, eschewed the conventions of art disciplines, disregarding forms with the aim of engaging the viewer.
Films, paintings, installations, drawings, photographs and documents: around 140 works by important artists who shattered existing structures and embraced political commitments, creating images that have proven pivotal to twentieth-century art. These include, among others, works by Antonio Berni, Delia Cancela, Eduardo Costa, Jorge de la Vega, Antonio Dias, Rubens Gerchman, Edgardo Giménez, Carmela Gross, Roberto Jacoby, Anna Maria Maiolino, Marta Minujín, Cildo Meireles, Pablo Menicucci, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Evandro Teixeira, Claudio Tozzi.
GAMeC is the third of the four venues of the show, which was hosted – with exhibition projects conceived for each institution – at Fundación PROA in Buenos Aires and Museu Oscar Niemeyer in Curitiba in 2012. It will then be staged at MAM – Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, concluding the exhibition itinerary.
The exhibition catalogue, published by Silvana Editoriale, is the Italian version of the publication put out for the exhibition at Fundación PROA and includes texts by Paulo Herkenhoff, Rodrigo Alonso and Gonzalo Aguilar as well as historical texts by Lawrence Alloway, Waldemar Cordeiro, León Ferrari, Roberto Jacoby, Oscar Masotta, Cildo Meireles, Luis Felipe Noé, Hélio Oiticica, Pierre Restany and Jorge Romero Brest.
Exhibition organized by: Fundación PROA / Luli Hunt – Cidadania Corporativa
A collaboration among: Fundación PROA, GAMeC, MAM – Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro
With the support of: Ministério da Cultura, Brazil (Lei Rouanet, A Lei nº 8.313) / Tenaris – Techint
Giuseppe Gabellone
8 March–5 May 2013
Curator: Alessandro Rabottini
GAMeC is presenting the first solo show at an Italian public institution of the work of Giuseppe Gabellone (b. Brindisi, 1973; lives and works in Paris).
The show marks the debut of a series of works created for the occasion and it marks Gabellone’s return to exhibiting in Italy after several years’ absence.
Since the second half of the nineties, Gabellone’s work has attracted the attention of the international public and critics because of his original approach to the languages of photography and sculpture, and its formal and conceptual rigour. As a result, at a very young age the artist was asked to participate in the Venice Biennale (in 1997 and 2003) as well as Documenta in Kassel (2002).
In his work, Gabellone explores the relationship between sculpture and photography, between two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality, between the image and its physicality, elevating the photographic medium and the concept of sculpture to new levels of language.
Moreover, the artist creates a dialogue between abstraction and figuration, tactile and visual, natural and artificial, hyper-realism and decoration, augmenting the ambiguous relationship between the tactile qualities of an image and its existence in a non-physical elsewhere.
For his exhibition at GAMeC, Gabellone developed a series of brand-new works within a layout designed in relation to the museum’s Spazio Zero. Three large wall-mounted works constitute the backbone of the exhibition and are the outcome of a compositional and sculptural process arising from the visual elaboration of words and short phrases. Each of these extremely intricate levels was then cast in plastic resin, a material that can record even the tiniest variations in the material, but that at the same time dampens the perception of manual labour, drawing away from it. These three monumental high reliefs thus create a series of oscillations and perceptual ambiguities between sculpture, painting and language.
Moreover, the exhibition space hosts a huge installation conceived to transform the spectator’s perceptual experience, stimulating the senses of touch and sight.
The exhibition is accompanied by a monographic catalogue that documents not only the project for GAMeC in Bergamo but also Gabellone’s artistic production over the past four years. The catalogue, published by Mousse Publishing, includes texts by Tom Morton, contributing editor of Frieze magazine and an independent curator, and Alessandro Rabottini, curator of the exhibition.
The exhibition is part of the series in honour of Arturo Toffetti.
For further information: www.gamec.it
