The depth of matter among Burri, Giacometti, Rodin and Rosso, a major exhibition at GAMeC in Bergamo

On view at GAMeC - Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo, from October 4, 2018 to January 6, 2019, is the exhibition Black Hole. Art and Materiality between Formless and Invisible, the opening exhibition of an ambitious cycle dedicated to the theme of matter, conceived by Lorenzo Giusti and developed together with Sara Fumagalli, with the scientific advice of physicist Diederik Sybolt Wiersma and the participation of BergamoScienza. Black Hole intends to activate a dialogue with the history of scientific and technological discoveries and a confrontation with the development of aesthetic theories, and turns its gaze to the work of those artists who have investigated the material element in its most intrinsic value. In particular, the exhibition aims to narrate the dimension of matter as an original element through three different restitutions: that of those who have looked at the material, concrete element as an original entity, preceding or alternative to form; that of those who have interpreted human nature as part of a broader material discourse; and that of those who, in the process of penetrating matter, have gone deep inside, to the boundaries of materiality itself, grasping its infinitesimal and energetic dimension. This is done with a selection of works ranging from the 19th century to the present day, illustrating this dialectic that oscillates between the materiality of the formless and the materiality of the invisible.

The exhibition is divided into three sections: Formless, Man-Matter and Invisible. In the first section, the works, starting from the acquisitions of science and their diffusion (as well as their influence on artists), seek to avoid the representation of the natural by using materials, both traditional and unusual, not as elements to be shaped with the intention of creating new forms, but by virtue of their intrinsic value, their presenting themselves as “elements in themselves.” Placed at the origin of this path are the researches of Jean Fautrier, with his concretions of layered color, and of Lucio Fontana, with his Natures of engraved matter, which, penetrated and lacerated, animating itself becomes a work. A line of research that continues, among others, with Antoni Tàpies’ lumpy surfaces interwoven with cracks and lacerations, the bituminous density of Alberto Burri’s Combustioni and Cretti, also present in Piero Manzoni’s early works, and, decades later, Urs Fischer’s “formless” Big Clays, Cameron Jamie’s “dripping” statues, and Ryan Sullivan’s ethereal cracked abstractions.

The second section focuses on how the nature that permeates the universe also defines human nature. Thus, within an articulated and transversal path, works by authors of different generations marked by a strong material component and at the same time by a presence, more or less manifest, of theanthropomorphic element are compared. These are works in which the human body is thus primarily a “material body” and in which the figure, hinted at or decomposed, becomes a vehicle for an integrated vision of the world, held together by the very principle of matter. The plastic syntheses of Auguste Rodin and Medardo Rosso, with their images of faces and bodies emerging from indistinct blocks, constitute a significant historical precedent for the research of a series of artists who, in different forms, have converged within a single creative vision the discourse on matter and the investigation of man. One example is Alberto Giacometti, with his “trapped” figures, as well as the Swiss sculptor Hans Josephsohn, with his characteristic monolithic heads, imprisoned within blocks of compact matter. Face and matter, purely pictorial, return in the early informal paintings of Enrico Baj, in Jean Dubuffet ’s Dames of the early 1950s as well as in the works of Karel Appel and Asger Jorn, historical members of the Co.Br.A. group, characterized by the use of bright colors, violent brushstrokes and distorted human figures. These masters of modernity are flanked by works by contemporary artists, from William Tucker, with his agglomerates of matter somewhere between rock and the human body, to Florence Peake, with her informal sculptures, the outcome of collective performances in which body and matter seem to seek a dynamic synthesis.

The third and final section instead investigates the most hidden aspects of matter, invisible to our eyes, in dialogue with the atomistic and subatomic dimensions. The starting point of an evolving discourse that finds ample development in contemporary languages are Jean Dubuffet’s famous Tessiturologies, close-up, microscopic visions of a generic “material element,” of which the idea of the incessant inner swarming is visually restored. A quest that finds echoes in the “matter-light” explosions of Tancredi Parmeggiani, or again in the compositions of the artists of the Movimento Arte Nucleare (founded in 1951 by Enrico Baj and Sergio Dangelo, with the addition, a year later, of Joe Colombo), who rework in visual form the suggestions provoked by the explosion of the atomic bomb at the end of World War II. From postwar to contemporary, the artists create new images of what scientific theories suggest but words and illustrations fail to describe. The classical notion of “matter,” valid from the familiar level of visible objects down to the molecular and atomic levels, fades to the subatomic levels, embracing the concept of energy. Thus, working closely with the Gran Sasso National Laboratories (among the world’s leading research institutes for the study of neutrinos) Jol Thomson creates a dialogue between science and art, investigating the territories of the material unknown, the intangible and the non-optical. Also moving along this line of research are the performances of Hicham Berrada, who invites the viewer to directly experience the energies and forces that emerge from matter, and the Photograms of Thomas Ruff, whose abstract compositions arise from an awareness of the existence of a microscopic universe, beyond the tangible dimension of things.

The exhibition is enriched by a full calendar of collateral events and a catalog that includes essays by Lorenzo Giusti, Sara Fumagalli, Alex Bacon, Mathieu Copeland, Anna Daneri, Heike Eipeldauer, Eva Fabbris, Chiara Gatti, Elio Grazioli, Luigia Lonardelli, Giorgio Mastinu, Fabiola Naldi, Alessandra Pioselli, and Kari Rittenbach. For all information you can log on to the GAMeC website.

Pictured: left, Alberto Burri, Cretto (1973; Città di Castello, Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri). Right, Alberto Giacometti, Lotar II (1964-65; Switzerland, Private Collection).

The depth of matter among Burri, Giacometti, Rodin and Rosso, a major exhibition at GAMeC in Bergamo

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