Nature according to 13 contemporary Italian artists: here is the exhibition The Garden of Arcadia in Milan

Milan ’s Gilda Contemporary Art gallery hosts Il giardino d’Arcadia, a group exhibition scheduled from May 27 to June 30 curated by Andrea Lacarpia. The project brings together the works of 13 artists from different generations (Andrea Barbagallo, Antonio Bardino, Marco Bettio, Daniele Carpi, Giuseppe Costa, Tamara Ferioli, Tania Fiaccadori, Matteo Gatti, Francesco Pacelli, Simone Pellegrini, Francesca Romana Pinzari, Silvia Serenari, and Silvia Trappa), with the intention of investigating the different approaches of the visual arts towards a complex and elusive sphere such as nature.

Gilda Contemporary Art’s focus on environmental issues and experiments in contemporary art is thus confirmed in an exhibition that poses multiple insights into the relationship between art and nature as parts of a single ecosystem. At a time of gradual return to activities in the city context and hope for an overcoming of the health emergency due to the spread of Covid-19, The Garden of Arcadia becomes a metaphor for the capacity for renewal that nature teaches us.

The exhibition combines different means of expression, such as paintings, sculptures, installations, digital processing and videos, put in relation with living plants included in the installation by Simone Ugolini (Pervinca Botanical Garden). The gallery thus becomes a garden in which vegetation and different expressions of artistic imagination coexist harmoniously, united by the same vital energy.

In the works on display, the subject of nature is declined in ways ranging from mythic-philosophical reflection, often aimed at the identification of an original dimension, to the construction of a post-natural imaginary that hybridizes biological forms and human products to express current transformations in the perception of natural and artificial.

The myth of Arcadia, a place far from the cities that the ancient Greeks considered the abode of the sylvan deities, has evolved in history going on to symbolize man’s need to rediscover a wild and primal nature, between reality and idealization. As in neoclassical Arcadian gardens, the exhibition aligns on the same narrative plane the concrete experience of life processes and the visual representation by which an imaginary garden is staged. The gallery is transformed into a “theater of nature,” an ecosystem in which biological forms and processes, among works of art and plants, can take on a magical and transcendent significance because they are far removed from everyday experience. The landscape becomes a map of the collective unconscious, of which the exhibition space is a visual expression, among millennia-old symbologies and bizarre hybridizations that unite humans, plants and animals to the same collective psyche.

For all information you can visit the official website of the Guild Contemporary Art.

Pictured: Antonio Bardino, Domestic landscape (2020; oil on canvas, 100 x 70 cm)

Nature according to 13 contemporary Italian artists: here is the exhibition The Garden of Arcadia in Milan

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