Emilio Prini : …E Prini

Ciao!

I’m happy to announce the opening of …E Prini, the most extensive exhibition ever dedicated to the work of Emilio Prini (Stresa, 1943–Rome, 2016). Comprising of over 250 works, the exhibition project, curated by Luca Lo Pinto and realized in collaboration with the Archivio Emilio Prini, is conceived according to a chronological path which spans fifty years, from 1966 to 2016.

The retrospective is fruit of an extensive research involving institutional and private collections, both Italian and international, to reconstruct the work of one of Italy’s most complex and enigmatic artistic figures from the recent past, whose work has not been fully surveyed to this day.

Prini emerges in 1967 following an invitation from Germano Celant to participate in the exhibition Arte povera—Im Spazio at Galleria La Bertesca, which sanctioned the birth of the Arte Povera movement. He thus takes part in some of the most significant international exhibitions of the time (Op Losse Schroeven, When Attitudes Become Form, Konzeption/Conception, Information, Contemporanea) until 1975, when he reduced his engagement with exhibition making to a minimum.

The initial focus of Prini’s production is based on a circumscribed number of ideas and works, upon which he would continue to expand up until the end of his life: these are re-elaborated and modified, often with minimal gestures such as updating the date, changing the title, isolating a detail, or by photographing and rebuilding a work, thus questioning its authorship, originality and uniqueness. Even when his output was most prolific, between 1967 and 1974, the majority of his projects would be exhibited only later (“partially disappearing”) and others would remain hypotheses on paper (“totally disappearing”). From the beginning of the 1980s, the artist further limited his presence in exhibitions, whilst continuing an intense activity of reflection and manipulation of his practice, which often took form in interventions on catalogs, posters and other printed matter.

“I don’t have a plan, I proceed through trial and error” declared the artist. He considered his oeuvre to be a unique path made up of constant re-writing, in which works function almost like the proof of an empirical and aesthetic verification of some postulates or concepts, such as the idea of the standard or of the void, through a series of data drawn from reality and subsequently put together. Prini always refused to understand a work of art as a closed and defined object and, as a result, he also questioned the codes defining how art is shown. The exhibition project thus attempts to reflect and make this position explicit.

…E Prini develops like a temporal perimeter and visual horizon in which works, photographs, invitations, typescripts and interventions on catalogues are exhibited without any form of distinction, along with sculptures and three-dimensional objects.

Suspended between standard and variable, Prini’s research explores a series of key concepts to their most extreme limits. His works, just as the apparatuses exploited in making them, exist in function of the impossibility of being defined and stopped in their movement. What ensues is a natural resistance with respect to the mechanisms of the art system, its processes of circulation and commodification, all of which render Prini’s practice particularly relevant in the present day, pointing towards yet un-answered questions.

With respect to a society which distinguishes itself for its hyperproduction and consumption of images and objects, the contemporary relevance of Prini’s research consists in his constant questioning of the necessity to produce, in the coherence of a way of being and operating independently and elusively, capable of challenging the canons of historicization and instruments of interpretation of art, all in the name of art itself.

The other exhibitions in my autumn programme continue. Depth of field creates an imaginative environment which reflects the paper architecture by artist and architect Alexander Brodsky (Moscow, 1955). Barrikadenwetter. Image Acts of Insurrection, curated by the Arsenale Institute, explores the concept and iconography of the barricade from its late Renaissance origins to the present day. Hear Alvin Here traces over fifty years of Alvin Curran’s (Providence, Rhode Island, 1938) musical research, also recounting his relationship with the city of Rome where he has lived and worked since 1965. Experimental Jetset presents AUTONOMIARTEPOVERARCHIZOOMEMPHISUPERSTUDIOPERAISMO, an installation dedicated to the “Italian sphere” which emerges from their study of two iconic signs, one appearing in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up and the other throughout several projects by Enzo Mari.

Please visit my website for updates and further content, and to explore current and past exhibitions.

I hope to see you soon!