The suits and the steel: at the GAM in Rome the works of Antonio Fraddosio

From November 1, 2018 to March 3, 2019, the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Rome is hosting works made of steel by Antonio Fraddosio.
An ethical installation, an anti-rhetorical monument dedicated toIlva workers and the city of Taranto. With sculptor Antonio Fraddosio’s new site-specific project, titled Antonio Fraddosio. Overalls and Steel, art confronts reality and in particular the dramatic story of the Ilva in Taranto; a universal denunciation against all situations in which the right to work is earned by giving one’s health, one’s life in exchange.

Confronting the peculiar spaces of the cloister-garden of the Gallery of Modern Art, Antonio Fraddosio exhibits ten large torn and twisted metal sheets, powerful and mysterious, recalling the overalls that are supposed to protect Ilva workers from cancer, deposited, at the end of the work shift and before going to the showers, in a kind of airlock.
Fraddosio’s stark stance is also that of a man from the South, moreover an Apulian by birth, who has seen with his own eyes, so many times over the years, the impressive transformation of Taranto caused by the Ilva steel plant, the largest inEurope.

As Gabriele Simongini writes in the catalog, in these iron shrouds the imprint of suffering human bodies remains, there is a sense of death and destruction but a kind of hope entrusted to art, to its cathartic possibilities, survives. In the metal sheets, each one different from the other, often emerge the poisonous, deadly colors inspired by the blanket of rust, the heavy, reddish dust, with brown and black hues, that envelops and suffocates the city affecting especially the Tamburi district, close to Ilva.
Antonio Fraddosio (Barletta, 1951) lives and works between Rome and Tuscania. Among his many exhibitions are the most recent: in 2012 solo shows in the rooms of Villa Bottini in Lucca and Spazio Cerere in Rome; in 2016 “Salvarsi dal naufragio. Antonio Fraddosio/Claudio Marini” presented at the Museo Carlo Bilotti - Aranciera di Villa Borghese in Rome. In 2011 he was invited to the Italian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, with “Black Flag in the Suspended Cage” exhibited at theArsenale.

The book accompanying the exhibition, published by La Casa Usher, in addition to the curators’ essays and photos of the site-specific installation, will contain texts by Michele Ainis, a well-known jurist and constitutionalist, Giuse Alemanno, a worker at Ilva and writer, and some shots of the reportage “Rosso Tamburi” made by Bari-based photographer Christian Mantuano. During the period of the site-specific exhibition at GAM planned dance events, readings and meetings. For all information you can visit GAM’s official website.

The suits and the steel: at the GAM in Rome the works of Antonio Fraddosio

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