Sixty years after his first solo exhibition, Rome pays tribute to the art of Ennio Calabria

"Ennio Calabria. Toward the Time of Being. Works 1958-2018": Palazzo Cipolla in Rome pays homage to the artist Ennio Calabria (Tripoli, 1937) with this retrospective, a major anthological exhibition, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of his first solo exhibition held in Rome, at La Feluca Gallery, in 1958.

The exhibition, which can be visited from November 20, 2018 to January 27, 2019, displays about eighty works, including paintings and pastels, to present to the public the entire artistic path of the painter, a great protagonist of Italian and European visionary and existential figuration.

His works are characterized by a complex and restless pictorial vitality and by philosophical and anthropological speculation; the artist’s goal is to depict the change in our society and man today, indicating possible future metamorphoses. For him, painting is a testimony, a living unity into which the artist introduces his whole self.

Curator Gabriele Simongini writes: “Along sixty years of research, painting for Calabria has always had a powerful social value, in a broad sense, as a cognitive tool of the infinite transformations of a world that has passed from the Cold War to the current global dominance of hi-tech corporations and of an Italy that is now unrecognizable, passed from the enthusiasm of reconstruction and economic boom to the bewilderment of today’s role as emblem of the European crisis. A painting of ”history,“ then, and albeit in a broad, etymological sense (from the Latin ”historia,“ meaning ”research, investigation, cognition“), never illustrative, with a profound identification between collective events and inner autobiography.” Interested in grasping the symptoms and causes of the regression and prevalence of a tendentially aggressive collective instinct that seems to correspond by contrast to the increasingly frenetic technological progress, Ennio Calabria believes that his painting today should be posited as something one feels, not as something one understands."

The exhibition begins with “Imponderable in the Circus,” a painting exhibited in the first solo show in 1958; it will be followed by the artist’s best-known masterpieces, such as “The City descending” (1963), “Funerali di Togliatti” (1965), “Pantheon” (1978-79), “La città dentro” (1987), “Presentimento d’acqua” and “Ombre del futuro” (2008), “Il pensiero nel corpo” (2010), “L’uomo e la Croce” (2016), and five unpublished works created in recent months. Also on display will be portraits and self-portraits, as well as pastels and a selection of some posters made by the artist himself.

The exhibition is promoted by the Fondazione Terzo Pilastro - Internazionale and realized by POEMA, in collaboration with theArchivio Calabria and with the technical support of Civita Mostre.

Hours: Daily from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Closed Mondays.

Tickets: Full 7 euros, reduced 5 euros. Free for children under 6.

Image: Ennio Calabria, Biography Revisited (1989; acrylic on canvas, 220 x 170 cm; Calabria Archive). Ph.Credit Alessandra Pedonesi

Sixty years after his first solo exhibition, Rome pays tribute to the art of Ennio Calabria

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