Rome, Giuseppe Modica's works on display at the Hendrik Christian Andersen House Museum

Open to the public until September 15 is the exhibition Giuseppe Modica. Mediterranean Routes and a Circular Vision, curated by Maria Giuseppina Di Monte and Gabriele Simongini, in the spaces of the Hendrik Christian Andersen House Museum directed by Maria Giuseppina Di Monte and pertaining to the State Museums Directorate of Rome, headed by Director General of Museums Massimo Osanna.

The event is carried out as part of the project Giuseppe Modica. Mediterranean Routes supported by the PAC2022-2023 - Plan for Contemporary Art, promoted by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, which enabled the acquisition of two works by artist Giuseppe Modica: Melancholy and the Mediterranean (2017, oil on panel) and Refraction. Atelier (2020, oil on canvas).

The path of the exhibition unfolds in the first-floor room of the House Museum through about 20 oil on canvas almost all of them unpublished works made in recent years in which, as Giuseppe Modica writes: The Mediterranean is not understood as a mythical Arcadia but as a place marked by multiple vicissitudes. Modica is a nationally and internationally established artist, among the leading exponents of a new metaphysics in Italian painting of the second half of the 20th century. In the exhibition at the Hendrik Christian Andersen House Museum, the works on display are characterized by enigmatic atmospheres that investigate painting in its various articulations: from a measured and phenomenal space of the surface to an illusory and imaginary space of depth. In this circular flow, time, light and memory, in its meanings of personal, cultural and anthropological memory, find a fundamental role. Blue stands out over everything because “it is the color of atmosphere and distance [...] it is also the color of spirituality and contemplation. And then with blue all the other colors light up, such as the reds and ochres that are the vital energy of light. Blue is a necessary counterpoint to light. It is the color of breath, of freedom and the vastness of the firmament.” (G. Modica).

Three years after the exhibition organized in the Hendrik Andersen House Museum in 2021, this new project on the Sicilian artist, who has lived and worked in the capital for more than 30 years, stems from the winning of the General Directorate for Contemporary Art and Creativity’s call for bids that allowed the Museum to acquire Giuseppe Modica’s two paintings Rifrazioni. Atelier of 2020 and Melancholy and Mediterranean. Circular Vision of 2017.

The title Mediterranean Routes and Circular Vision is programmatic in that, unlike the previous cross-cutting exhibition, this latest one focuses on works that have as their subject the migration of Mediterranean peoples, a theme dear to the artist, whose family home in Mazara del Vallo, overlooks the Mare Nostrum and is a recurring leitmotif in the master’s works.

Writes Maria Giuseppina Di Monte, Director of the House Museum, “Modica succeeded in doing what Cézanne taught and yearned for, that is, to make an image, because this is the task of painting, outside and above any linguistic and/or literary compromise. This principle of truth leads Modica to work with light and air: the former creates the color and the latter envelops the forms. Two more factors must be kept in mind: geometry and perspective, indispensable foundations of painting.”

"Distilling and simplifying more and more his language and forms, sometimes almost stripping away the object presences to come to paint only the adventures (as Piero Dorazio called them) of light and shadow, maintaining the rigor and balance of an architectural structuring that goes back even to his youthful studies,“ writes Gabriele Simongini, ”Modica even succeeds, in some of the most significant works on display in the exhibition, to condense magnificently in suspended but intense images the tragedy that transformed the Mare Nostrum of the Romans into Mare Monstrum... The Mediterranean is an integral part of Modica’s Sicilian origins and of his own painting, innervated by blues that from time to time know how to be pure luminous essence or plastic substance and in any case, always, a sort of amniotic liquid in which suspended spaces and times are materialized, aimed at circular eternity."

Giuseppe Modica was born in Mazara del Vallo in 1953 and studied at theAcademy of Fine Arts in Florence. In 1986 he moved to Rome, where he currently lives and works. He held the chair of Painting at theAcademy of Fine Arts in Rome and was director of the visual arts department. In 1990 he was invited to the VI International Triennial of Engraving, Palazzo della Permanente, Milan. In 1999 he was invited to the XIII Quadriennale di Roma, Palazzo delle Esposizioni. In 2001 he is at the 8th International Biennale of Contemporary Art, Cairo. In 2007 he is invited to the exhibition Italian Art 1968-2007 at Palazzo Reale in Milan curated by Vittorio Sgarbi. In 2011 he is invited to the 54th International Biennale of Contemporary Art in Venice, Italian Pavilion, Corderie Arsenale. In 2023 he is in the exhibition E la mia patria è dove l’erba trema curated by Giuseppe Appella at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome.

Scholars such as Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, Claudio Strinati, Vittorio Sgarbi, Janus, Guido Giuffrè, Marco Goldin, Giovanni Lista, Sasha Grishin, Gabriele Simongini, Giovanni Faccenda, Francesco Gallo Mazzeo, Marcello Fagiolo, Guglielmo Gigliotti, Franco Fanelli, Giuseppe Appella, Marco Di Capua, Lea Mattarella, Francesca Romana Morelli, among others, have written about him; literati and philosophers such as Leonardo Sciascia, Antonio Tabucchi, Giorgio Soavi, Massimo Onofri, Rocco Ronchi, Roberto Calasso, Giorgio Agamben, Zhang Xiaoling, Ying Yinfei and others.

He has exhibited in Italy and abroad in prestigious retrospectives and museum exhibitions; among others are: 2022 Schema and Transcendence curated by Chen Jian and Ying Yinfei at the Zhejiang Art Museum in Hang Zhou; 2021 Giuseppe Modica Atelier 1990-2021 curated by Maria Giuseppina Di Monte and Gabriele Simongini at the Hendrik Christian Andersen House Museum in Rome; 2018 Light of memory curated by Giorgio Agamben and Zhang Xiaoling, Chinese National Academy of Painting, Beijing; 2017 Phoenix Art Exhibition Fenghuang City Museums, Southeast China; 2016-17 Atelier of Light and Memory curated by Donatella Cannova Italian Cultural Institute Sidney, Italian Embassy Canberra and Italian Cultural Institute, Melbourne; 2016 placement of the triptych The Crucifixion of Light in the Mother Church of Gibellina curated by Marcello Fagiolo; 2015 La melancolie onirique de Giuseppe Modica Galleria Sifrein, Paris curated by Giovanni Lista; 2014 La luce di Roma curated by Roberto Gramiccia at Galleria La Nuova Pesa, Rome; 2010 Inseguire la pittura curated by Laura Gavioli Galleria Civica, Potenza; Rome and the City riflessa curated by Claudio Strinati, at Palazzo di Venezia, Rome; 2007 La realtà dell’illusione curated by Guido Giuffrè, Galleria Civica di Marsala; 2005 L’enigma del tempo e l ’ alchemy of light curated by Aldo Gerbino at the Loggiato di San Bartolomeo, Palermo; 2004 Piero ed altri enigmi curated by Giovanni Faccenda Galleria, Civica di Arezzo; “Reflection” as a metaphor for painting curated by Claudio Strinati, at the Vittoriano Rome; 2002 Light is light is light, curated by Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, Palazzo del Seminario, Mazara del Vallo; 1998, A metaphysician in the land of the Phoenicians curated by Paolo Nifosì, Palazzo Spadaro Scicli; 1997-98 Modica opere 1989-1997 curated by Marco Goldin, Treviso, Casa dei Carraresi; 1993, Retrospective Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara with text by Maurizio Fagiolo and poetry by Cesare Vivaldi; 1990 Le Stanze inquiete at Tour Fromage, Aosta, curated by Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco.

For all information, you can call +39 06 3219089, send an e-mail to dms-rm.museoandersen@cultura.gov.it or visit the official website of the State Museums Directorate in Rome.

Image: Giuseppe Modica, Warships in Transit (2022-2023; oil on canvas, 160 x 360 cm)

Rome, Giuseppe Modica's works on display at the Hendrik Christian Andersen House Museum

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.