Mimmo Paladino's Sleepers on display in Milan.

Opening today at Cardi Gallery in Milan is the exhibition Mimmo Paladino. The Sleepers, open to the public until April 30, 2021.

The Dormienti were made in terracotta in the late 1990s, when Mimmo Paladino first exhibited them in Poggibonsi (1998) as part of the Arte all’Arte exhibition. In 2000 they were cast in bronze for the permanent installation at the Fonte delle Fate in Poggibonsi. Other terracotta Dormienti and Coccodrilli were made for the major exhibition in the underground spaces of the Roundhouse in London (1999), in dialogue with a sound system specially designed by British musician, composer and producer Brian Eno. The Sleepers were also shown in Milan in 2011 in an exhibition at the Royal Palace and then again later at the Archaeological Museum.

Twenty years later, the artist personally curates a new, never-before-seen display of them, specially designed for the first exhibition in Milan. He arranges thirty-two sculptures according to a new conceptual construction, reshaping the tone of the installation with solemnity. On this occasion, too, the Sleepers are accompanied by Brian Eno’s musical compositions, with the intention of freeing them from the heaviness of sleep or the evanescence of dream, restoring to them a vital breath and a serene concreteness.

“Recurring in Paladino is the idea of assembling forms as if they were modules,” declares Demetrio Paparoni, author of the volume accompanying the exhibition. “It should not be forgotten that the artist has on several occasions manifested the aptitude for creating works conceived as a collection of fragments archived in his visual imagination. It is this aptitude that has led him to make works together with Sol Le Witt, Alighiero Boetti and not least Brian Eno, artists who have always worked with a different concept of module and repetition.”

In addition to the bodies of I Dormienti is also on display in the exhibition, on the second floor, the large unpublished work Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down consisting of one hundred drawings made during 2020. This work, as well as I Dormienti, is emblematic of the artist’s way of conceiving the work, a puzzle in which fragments converge into a monumental unicum, images that populate the artist’s world in search of a natural balance between intimism and collective memory.

For info: www.cardigallery.com

Image: Mimmo Paladino, I Dormienti, installation at Cardi Gallery, Milan. Ph.Credit Carlo Vannini

Mimmo Paladino's Sleepers on display in Milan.

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