Bologna, at the Davia Bargellini Museum the first solo exhibition of Davide D'Elia

From January 21 to March 20, 2022, the Davia Bargellini Museum in Bologna is hosting the exhibition Fresco by Davide D’Elia (Cava de’ Tirreni, 1973), curated by Elisa Del Prete and promoted by NOS Visual Arts Production, in collaboration with Istituzione Bologna Musei | Musei Civici d’Arte Antica. The exhibition is part of ART CITY Bologna 2022. It is the artist’s first solo exhibition.

The intervention is designed in dialogue with the museum’s collection, located inside a 17th-century palazzo. On display will be eight Plexiglas paintings from the FRESCO cycle created by the artist during a previous site-specific intervention operated in 2018 on the frescoes of the Salone delle Feste of the Palazzo Atti-Pensi in Todi, a 16th-century residence in the main square of the Umbrian city.

For some time the artist has been investigating the relationship between past and present, art history and contemporary art, academic painting and pictorial “gesture,” in a path that places at the center a rethinking on form and color in a current key. To create the FRESCO cycle in Todi, the artist did not intervene directly on the frescoes, but affixed specially designed Plexiglas structures. This allows him to lay down “iris blue” paint backgrounds sometimes hiding the organic elements of the landscape and sometimes the architecture in an effort to bring out the construction of the paintings of the frescoes below. Once removed from the frescoes, the eight paintings became abstract paintings on which the trace of compositional investigation was preserved, creating a dialogue between “absent painting” and “present painting.”

The Bologna exhibition is enriched by two new site-specific interventions, Zero and Zero1, on two paintings from the museum’s collection both entitled Landscape with Figures by Vincenzo Martinelli (late 18th century) displayed in Room 1. Zero and Zero1, as they leave the original site of the Davia Bargellini Museum to be exhibited elsewhere, will in turn activate a process of translation by taking the primary context with them.

The visit offers a virtual reality experience (created by Filippo Pagotto/EL CA BO), through which the visitor becomes a witness to the simultaneity of the work by reuniting the cycle with its original source.

During the period of the exhibition, the Davia Bargellini Museum will host a talk with the artist to launch the Tiepido Cool publishing project, of which Istituzione Bologna Musei | Musei Civici d’Arte Antica is a cultural partner, supported by the 10th Edition of the Italian Council, the program for the international promotion of Italian art in the world promoted by the Ministry of Culture’s General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity.

For info: www.museibologna.it/arteantica

Hours: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.; Friday from 2 to 6 p.m.; Saturday, Sunday and holidays from 10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.-

Free admission.

Image: Davide D’Elia, Fresco, exhibition layout (2018; Todi, Palazzo Pensi) Photo © M3S Roma

Bologna, at the Davia Bargellini Museum the first solo exhibition of Davide D'Elia

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