Lugano, the Olgiati Collection offers an all red-centric display

The Giancarlo and Danna Olgiati Collection in Lugano is tinged with red with the exhibition Vedo Rosso, a new thematic exhibition that the public can visit from March 26 to June 12, 2022. The exhibition brings into dialogue works by thirty-five artists from different generations, nationalities and cultures in an immersive journey that investigates the theme of red in its variety of meanings and expressive qualities. Thirty-nine works including paintings, photographs, sculptures and installations are on display.

The exhibition relates a selection of works from the Olgiati Collection, mainly from the 1960s to the present, many of which are presented for the first time on this occasion. The Giancarlo and Danna Olgiati Collection has chosen this theme to propose an exemplary confrontation between artists and women artists who are chronologically and stylistically distant from each other, emphasizing the multiplicity of interpretations of the color red. The installation is thus configured as an investigation into the symbolic value of red, articulated according to visual and semantic associations that are only partially faithful to chronology and historiographical distinctions. It is precisely through this unprecedented perspective on the founding themes and main trends that make up the Collection that new correspondences between only seemingly irreconcilable languages can be grasped, where the dialogue between the historical avant-gardes of the 20th century and the contemporary is a founding element.

The exhibition opens with a reflection on the color red in metaphysical terms. Painted plaster casts by Claudio Parmiggiani, juxtaposed with paintings by two protagonists of the Italian Transavanguardia, Mimmo Paladino and Francesco Clemente, welcome the visitor, involving him in an atmosphere of enigmatic suspension and evoking an arcane symbolism that draws on iconographies of the past, sometimes interwoven with personal memories.

The symbolic horizon of red also captures the red-velocity relationship: the exuberance of red is accompanied by the iconography of the automobile in a variety of works ranging from a 1929 collage of colored papers by futurist Fortunato Depero, to a significant example of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s most recent mirror paintings, to a tribute to recently deceased sculptor Jimmie Durham, recipient of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2019 Venice Biennale.

This is followed by a chapter devoted to one of the founding nuclei of the Olgiati Collection, Nouveau Réalisme: French artists Arman and Martial Raysse enhance the attractive power of red to celebrate everyday objects by elevating them to a new artistic material. And again, the use of red distinguishes the researches of Italian abstractionists Ettore Colla and Piero Dorazio; if the latter resort to reducing color to its most “simple, peremptory and incisive” expressive function, the original collages of the American Conrad Marca-Relli and the famous brush prints of Ticino artist Niele Toroni constitute further investigations of the color red according to very personal abstract codes.

An autonomous space is devoted to a nucleus of three works by the Anglo-Indian Anish Kapoor, who transports the public into the existential and philosophical dimension of red through the poetic image of the “flower” - the sculpture 1000 Names, 1982 - entirely covered in pure pigment, a living substance that becomes the very essence of the creative act.

In the next section, a red monochrome from 1956 by Yves Klein - one of the most prominent exponents of Nouveau Réalisme - is emblematic of the choice of absolute chromatic simplicity that distinguishes the artist’s entire creative journey, in the tension toward the immateriality of the void. An immaterial, cosmic and spiritual space is also evoked in Lucio Fontana’s monochrome surfaces studded with holes. His Concetto spaziale (Spatial Concept (Theater), 1965, is presented in relation to two other important works of the 20th century, a 1969 self-portrait by Gino De Dominicis and a circa 1988 igloo by Mario Merz, in an ideal dialogue on the theme of the immortality of the work of art, as well as on the dialectic between the individual and the universe. This is followed by a tribute to the conceptual art of Giulio Paolini, who is present in the exhibition with an iconic collage from 1969, where the choice of red is entirely arbitrary and subordinate to reflection on the space of representation. And again in the works of Tano Festa and Mario Schifano, protagonists of the Roman art scene of the early 1960s, red coexists with pictorial experimentation and conscious inquiry into the language of art. Schifano’s impressive landscape titled Palma, 1973, is exhibited in the next room, activating a surprising correspondence with the red-flamed sky of Luigi Russolo’s painting Aurora boreale, 1938.

The last section presents works from the narrow contemporary period, where red is associated with stringently topical themes. Through sculptures inspired by the color and shape of drops of blood, Italian Chiara Dynys and Palestinian Mona Hatoum, albeit with different meanings and modalities, metaphorically allude to themes such as human frailty, oppression and the marginality of the female condition, while Americans Kelley Walker and Wade Guyton, protagonists of the New Pop scene, offer an equally profound look at the symbolism of red as a representation and evocation of violence whether physical or psychological.

Artists in the exhibition: Arman (Nice, 1928 - New York, 2005) / Alighiero Boetti (Turin, 1940 - Rome, 1994) / Francesco Clemente (Naples, 1952) / Ettore Colla (Parma, 1896 - Rome, 1968) / Gino De Dominicis (Ancona, 1947 - Rome, 1998) / Fortunato Depero (Fondo, 1892 - Rovereto, 1960) / Piero Dorazio (Rome, 1927 - Perugia, 2005) / Jimmie Durham (Houston, 1940 - Berlin, 2021) / Chiara Dynys (Mantua, 1958) / Tano Festa (Rome, 1938-1988) / Lucio Fontana (Rosario, Santa Fe, 1899 - Comabbio, 1968) / Marco Gastini (Turin, 1938-2018) / Wade Guyton (Hammond, 1972) / Mona Hatoum (Beirut, 1952) / Anish Kapoor (Bombay, 1954) / Yves Klein (Nice, 1928 - Paris, 1962) / Conrad Marca-Relli (Boston, 1913 - Parma, 2000) / Mario Merz (Milan, 1925-2003) / Gabriel Orozco (Xalapa, 1962) / Mimmo Paladino (Paduli, 1948) / Giulio Paolini (Genoa, 1940) / Claudio Parmiggiani (Luzzara, 1943) / Michelangelo Pistoletto (Biella, 1933) / Walid Raad (Chbanieh, 1967) / Martial Raysse (Golfe Juan, 1936) / Sterling Ruby (Bitburg, 1972) / Ed Ruscha (Omaha, 1937) / Luigi Russolo (Portogruaro, 1885 - Cerro di Laveno, 1947) / Salvatore Scarpitta (New York, 1919-2007) / Mario Schifano (Homs, 1934 - Rome, 1998) / Sacha Sosno (Marseille, 1937 - Munich, 2013) / Wolfgang Tillmans (Remscheid, 1968) / Niele Toroni (Muralto, 1937) / Kelley Walker (Columbus, 1969) / Aaron Young (San Francisco, 1972).

Lugano, the Olgiati Collection offers an all red-centric display

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