Renato Leotta lands in America for his first U.S. solo exhibition

New York ’s Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimó will host the first solo exhibition in America of artist Renato Leotta (Turin, Italy, 1982) and a new installation conceived for the park surrounding the Magazzino Italian Art Foundation in Cold Spring from April 30 to June 12, 2019. The initiative marks the third collaboration between the two institutions and confirms their commitment to presenting contemporary Italian artists in the United States.

To create his works, Leotta enlists the help of the forces of nature, including gravity, the moon, oceans and other expanses of water: using sculpture, photography, textiles and film footage, the artist aims to reveal the relationships between the sea, sky and earth and to create new relationships between real and ideal environments that exist in reality or only in the imagination of the viewer.

At Cold Spring, Renato Leotta will create various projects that actively engage the environment, including the construction of a darkroom immersed in the waters of the Hudson River to capture images of the full moon, which the artist calls Lunagrams. At Magazzino he will present a new site-specific installation that will connect his lemon grove in Sicily, a constant source of inspiration for him, to the Magazzino Italian Art Foundation ’s park and the city of New York.

Starting with the recent work Notte di San Lorenzo (2018), which debuted at Manifesta 12 in Palermo, the artist’s project for Magazzino will bring to life a composite landscape, arising from his personal experience of domestic and natural spaces, making different environments coexist.

At Casa Italiana, he will present new works, including photographs, fabric works and new versions of the ongoing project Gipsoteca, a series of sand relief sculptures begun on the Sicilian coast. In the new Gipsoteca series, Two Hands, Leotta intends to capture the instant when the sea meets the shore through plaster casts made directly on the beaches of Long Island and Portugal. For him, theocean is an active part of the creative process, working on opposite sides of the Atlantic to create his sculptures.

The exhibition will be accompanied by the first monograph documenting the artist’s work.

For info: www.magazzino.art

Image: Renato Leotta, TWO HANDS (Theme and Variations - West #1) (2019; Clay, sand, and shells, 5.1 x 33 x 45.1 cm)
Courtesy Magazzino Italian Art Foundation, Photo by Alexa Hoyer

Renato Leotta lands in America for his first U.S. solo exhibition

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