The Vedovamazzei duo presents Bell, an unprecedented work inspired by a bell

The artistic duo Vedovamazzei is the protagonist in Fermo with a new artwork in dialogue with the museum collection of the Pinacoteca Civica. The work was created for the Bell project, conceived and curated by Matilde Galletti and with which the city of Fermo was the winner of the PAC2021 - Plan for Contemporary Art, promoted by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture.

Therefore, from February 26 to June 3, 2023, the Pinacoteca Civica of Palazzo dei Priori in Fermo will host the Bell exhibition: a number of historical works by the duo Vedovamazzei will be on display, as well as the new work from the project, which will then remain permanently in the museum collection.

The Bell sculpture was conceived by Vedovamazzei in close dialogue with Fermo’s Pinacoteca Civica and its art collection, based on both the material reality of the place (site specific) and the context all (context specific), that is, a reference collection of art from the past that already exists, the community from which it is hosted, and the current historical moment. This mixture is based on the close relationship between past and present history so that they enhance each other.

The duo’s project is inspired by an 18th-century bell from Palazzo dei Priori and now part of the Civic Art Gallery’s collection. The artists imagined working on the sound of the town that recalls a collective moment: the bell that invites citizens to moments of gathering, alerts them to danger, rings in celebration, and thus the bell that materially and figuratively gathers the town community. An object that, in the artists’ imagination, is thus representative of the community at a specific historical moment, which characterized a time when technology was simple and rudimentary.

The duo chose to represent what for them is the symbol of our most contingent contemporaneity, an object that, especially in the past two years, has been ever-present in anyone’s daily life. It is a cardboard box opened and turned upside down, worn out and abandoned after bearing its gift. The contents, known and expected by those who ordered it, was the only certainty at a juncture of lability and uncertainty. A box, one of many that during the hard times of lockdown, isolation and endless desolation, made us feel a community, gathered us as the bells of yore gathered us and made us feel united.

From Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes to Fischli and Weiss’s bell boxes, these common objects, precisely by virtue of their banality, have been repeatedly taken by artists as representative models of a society and, like the everyday village bell, have entered museums in their own right.

The Bell sculpture is made of bronze (same material as the bell) and hand-painted. It echoes, in its proportions, the volume of the room in the Art Gallery where it is placed, reversing the container-content relationship. It has reproduced, in the spaces dedicated to the scotch with which this ideal parcel was closed, the inscriptions found on the bell that was the inspiration for this work.

Together with the PAC2021 winning work, the rooms of the Pinacoteca Comunale will present in the exhibition some historical works of the Vedovamazzei duo in dialogue with the iconographic repertoire of the permanent collection, with the intention of letting people discover their artistic path. Such as the work Masks, one of the duo’s early works that reason about the concept of identity, fun and childlike spirit, or the sculpture Birds on the theme of affirming the identity of a place. The chosen works are intended to strengthen and emphasize a dialectical exchange between works from the past (which make up the host collection) and those from the present that have been created by the invited artists. The works on display tell of the versatility of these artists both in their use of different imagery and in their choice of themes.

As part of the Fermano project, a free agile publication was also produced with a narrative of the Bell work’s journey from conception to final placement.

For info: www.fermomusei.it

Hours: Tuesday through Sunday from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 3:30 to 6 p.m.

Ticket: Full 8 euros; reduced 6 euros for children 14 to 25 years old, groups of more than 15 people, FAI members, Touring Club Italia members, Italia Nostra members); free under 13, disabled, Icom members, journalists with ID.

The ticket also includes admission to the city’s museum circuit and the exhibition The Painters of Reality.

Image: Vedovamazzei, Bell (painted bronze). Photo by Cristiano Coin. Courtesy of Vedovamazzei.

The Vedovamazzei duo presents Bell, an unprecedented work inspired by a bell

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