Siena, at Santa Maria della Scala an exhibition on the fantastic travels of Aldo Mondino

From April 8 to July 9, 2023, Siena dedicates an exhibition to the fantastic travels of Aldo Mondino (Turin, 1938 - 2005). In fact, the museum complex of Santa Maria della Scala is hosting the exhibition Aldo Mondino. START. An unceasing beginning, curated by Vittoria Coen: on display are more than 30 works by one of the undisputed protagonists in the contemporary panorama of national and international artistic experimentation. The exhibition recounts Mondino’s incredible artistic research that ranges through the use of different techniques and materials, from the seeds of the first carpets, to works with sugar and nougat, from iron to bronze and ceramics, from caramel to chocolate, from glass to eraclite, and finally to oil painting on linoleum. An artist who traverses time and space in an extraordinarily surprising way, with an open and curious gaze turned to the East, the Arab world, North Africa, India, and the Jewish tradition. Dervishes, sultans, rabbis, all the way to people of sub-Saharan origin appear on the scene.

After all, the artist from Turin was first and foremost a curious traveler who brought this passion back to his works, recounting exotic worlds and heterogeneous ethnic groups: a fantastic world on display in the spaces of Santa Maria della Scala, the ancient Sienese hospital that has been a welcoming place for travelers and pilgrims since the thirteenth century.

The exhibition is articulated through works created between the 1980s and the early 2000s, including paintings on linoleum and medium- and large-scale sculptures from important public and private collections, in an engaging journey aimed at deepening a simultaneous vision of the poetic evolution of this great artist. Particularly fascinating is the Arab theme, born in the mid-1980s, which gives rise to figures moving in an imaginary space: Algerian women, Constantine Jews, merchants, the latter, depicted between the second half of the 1990s and 2001, seen in Morocco. They are exotic portraits of men in traditional dress displaying their wares, wool, clothespins and various souvenirs, intense photograms that take us to a world and habits of life completely different from our own. The dervishes, on the other hand, dance in a collective prayer that causes them to levitate in the air, in an ideal embrace shrouded in spirituality, alongside the rabbis, the masters, the sages, who have so fascinated the artist. He is a well-rounded artist, Aldo Mondino, multifaceted and curious, dandy and eccentric, who recounts in his works the thousands of experiences he has had, always accompanied by a tireless and true intellectual curiosity.

The exhibition, set up in the spaces of the sixth level of Palazzo Squarcialupi, is organized by the Fondazione Antico Ospedale Santa Maria della Scala in collaboration with the Aldo Mondino Archive and is made possible thanks to the contribution of Ars Movendi. For information visit the Santa Maria della Scala website.

Image: Aldo Mondino, Arab Feast.

Siena, at Santa Maria della Scala an exhibition on the fantastic travels of Aldo Mondino

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