An exhibition on Andrea Di Marco in Palermo on the 10th anniversary of his death

An exhibition in Palermo, at Monte dei Pegni in Palazzo Branciforte, to remember one of the most interesting Italian painters of recent years, Andrea Di Marco (Palermo, 1970 - 2012), on the tenth anniversary of his death. The exhibition, curated by Sergio Troisi and Alessandro Pinto, is titled Pegno, runs from Nov. 10, 2022 to Jan. 8, 2023, and is conceived, right from the venue and the setting, as a tribute to the unmistakable figurative poetics of the artist: in the large rooms of the Monte dei Pegni (pawnshop), now the headquarters of the Fondazione Sicilia, there are in fact about thirty of his paintings , some of them large, placed in close dialogue with the wooden shelving that runs through the rooms as far as the eye can see. The exhibition is promoted by the Andrea Di Marco Archive in collaboration with the Fondazione Sicilia and the Academy of Fine Arts of Palermo and realized with the contribution of Elenk’Art and Galleria Bonelli.

The title of the exhibition refers not only to its venue, but also recalls the elusive simplicity of many of the titles Di Marco chose for his works(Apecasse, Radar, Seduto, Steso, just to name a few on display). The memory of the poor pawned objects is thus intertwined with that of the simple things painted by Di Marco, poised between expectation and abandonment: chairs, armchairs, bicycles, toys, umbrellas, clothes, fabrics, but also portcullises lowered on deserted streets and motorbeams loaded with crates. All recurring subjects in his production, in a sort of physical and mental inventory that the rendering of the pictorial material charges with an estranged and melancholy fixity. The feeling of emptiness, implicit in these urban landscapes deprived, suddenly and as if by a spell, of their usual movement, is reiterated in the exhibition by the rhythmic and barely varied texture of the shelving.

Collected in the exhibition are the author’s most emblematic works, those populated by abandoned or disused objects, but also those that best represent that particular realism that has led Andrea Di Marco to be increasingly identified with Palermo and Sicily, highlighting its mocking and at the same time melancholy gaze.

With Alessandro Bazan, Francesco De Grandi and Fulvio Di Piazza, Andrea Di Marco had given birth in the late 1990s and early 2000s to the School of Palermo, a fellowship that had established itself on the Italian art scene “at a time,” explains curator Sergio Troisi, “in which the phase of the return to painting was declining in favor of a different horizon of conceptual proposals and new media, identifying a point of convergence and irradiation of the four paths in the very idea of painting, its material and its stratified memory, as a place of exploration of contemporary feeling.” Di Marco’s strict formal rigor, in particular, gave each of his subjects an evident concreteness, gave them back depth and luminosity, placing himself in continuity with the history of art and humanity.

The exhibition opens Thursday through Sunday from 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Closed Dec. 25, open Dec. 24 and 31, also 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Admission: full 7 euros, reduced 5 euros. For information write to the Andrea Di Marco Archive at info@archivioandreadimarco.org.

Image: Andrea Di Marco, Apecasse (2010; oil on canvas, 45 x 60 cm).

An exhibition on Andrea Di Marco in Palermo on the 10th anniversary of his death

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