Bertozzi & Casoni's ceramic compositions on display at MARCA in Catanzaro, Italy.

From September 21 to November 20, 2019, the MARCA - Catanzaro Museum of the Arts will host the exhibition Bertozzi & Casoni. Terra!, which presents 30 works in different formats, created by the two of the most important and recognized masters of contemporary ceramic sculpture.

The first solo exhibition on Calabrian soil of the duo formed by Giampaolo Bertozzi (Borgo Tossignano, 1957) and Stefano Del Monte Casoni (Lugo di Romagna, 1961), organized by the Rocco Guglielmo Foundation and theProvincial Administration of Catanzaro, and curated by Michele Bonuomo, deals with a number of themes dear to the two artists, first and foremost that of food in all its forms (banquet leftovers, garbage, cans, scraps, dustbins), as well as flowers, animals, and elements of daily life that, skillfully dismembered and reassembled, make up the unusual still lifes made in polychrome ceramics that have made them famous.

An ideal connection with the territory is given by the fact that there is a tradition of ceramic art in Calabria that has its roots in Magna Graecia, that ceramic art that Bertozzi & Casoni have been able to reinterpret within the contemporary art scene: polychrome ceramics, in fact, constitutes their privileged medium to ensure a reproduction that more often than not exceeds reality, while the imagery fishes in the everyday, among objects that are recovered just when they become waste, refuse, with obvious reference to the consumer society.

As the curator states in his essay in the catalog, “In more than thirty years of work and wide-ranging experimentation in their Imola ’factory’, they have developed one of the most original and complex lessons in contemporary sculpture [...] a technical and expressive mastery that, without ever being virtuosity as an end in itself, has something astonishing about it: an executive magic put at the disposal of the language of ceramics, too often and wrongly considered the handmaiden of other forms, who knows why, defined as more noble.”

The result is works constantly hovering between compositional surrealism and formal hyperrealism, in which the vanitas and caducity of the organic world are connected to those feelings of disgust and horror that project the public into the world of disposability and the futility of modern materialism; but through ceramics Bertozzi & Casoni give objects new existence, giving them a kind of new “eternal” life. The objects, in fact, removed from perishability, acquire a new value, which is that of aesthetic enjoyability.

The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual (Italian/English) catalog published by Silvana Editoriale.

For all information you can call +39 0961.746797, send an e-mail to info@museomarca.com or visit www.museomarca.info.

To learn more about Bertozzi & Casoni you can visit www.bertozziecasoni.it and www.museobertozziecasoni.com.

Pictured: Bertozzi & Casoni, Cielo (2018; polychrome ceramic, 15 x 58 x 48 cm)

Source: press release

Bertozzi & Casoni's ceramic compositions on display at MARCA in Catanzaro, Italy.

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