Turin, Mazzoleni donates public sculpture tribute to Leonardo da Vinci to the city

Mazzoleni Gallery has unveiled a new public work for Turin: a sculptural group entitled Anatomia Umana created by Salvatore Astore, which the gallery has donated to the city.

The sculpture, permanently placed in Corso Galileo Ferraris at the intersection with Via Cernaia, is a tribute to Leonardo da Vinci. Deeply fascinated from the beginning of his career by the anatomical drawings of the genius, starting in 1985 Astore focused his work on the production of anthropomorphic sculptures in painted welded iron and later in stainless steel. As an evolution of the sculptures of the 1980s and 1990s, in recent years the artist has made a cycle of works with a similar organic matrix, but with freer formal developments: sculptures of considerable size characterized by the presence of large holes, which make the relationship with the external space more fluid.

The sculptural group consists of a pair of vertical satin-finished stainless steel sculptures over five meters in height. The monumentality andorganic essentiality of the material establish a dialectical relationship with the surrounding urban and natural landscape. The dimension of the sculptures’ internal concave spaces, as opposed to their external convex surfaces, imposes itself as the protagonist and is part of a dynamic in which the alternation between empty and full spaces is punctuated by imagery. In a skillful conceptual rhetoric, the artist experiments with geometry and volumes, reaching a labile limit where human intervention vanishes and that of nature continues, giving rise to new forms and new anatomies.

This site-specific artistic intervention participates in the revaluation of a public space and is a model of public-private synergy.
The exhibition project, curated by Francesco Poli, is part of the celebrations of the fifth centenary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death and is realized in collaboration with the City of Turin, under the coordination of the Public Art Office and with the patronage of the Piedmont Region and the Metropolitan City of Turin. Lighting for the work is provided by Iren.

"Anatomia Umana, this recent sculptural work of mine in which two enormous holes shaped like skull caps deliberately stand out,“ says Salvatore Astore, ”are, in my view, the plastic translation of concepts such as matter, weight, form, and emptiness that I have always investigated in my sculpture-making. The attempt to relate the part with the whole, the visible form of things with the immaterial aspect of knowledge, as well as the urgency to search for the organicity of form, is my way of continuing the research on Man and the relationship between man and the world. In this, Anatomia Umana, is definitely a personal tribute to the great genius of the Renaissance, the artist who, more than any other, put Man in relation to knowledge."

Image: Salvatore Astore, Human Anatomy. Ph.Credit Galleria Mazzoleni - Cecilia Allemandi

Turin, Mazzoleni donates public sculpture tribute to Leonardo da Vinci to the city

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