Venice, the major exhibition on Emilio Isgrò, curated by Germano Celant, at the Cini Foundation

The Giorgio Cini Foundation presents for the fall season a new, rich anthological exhibition dedicated to a great Italian artist, Emilio Isgrò (Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto, 1937). The exhibition is organized with Archivio Emilio Isgrò and features works from the 1960s to the present in a setting that will transform the exhibition spaces in an unprecedented way

Emilio Isgrò (this is the title of the review), from September 13 to November 24, 2019 is an exhibition, curated by Germano Celant, in collaboration with the artist and Archivio Emilio Isgrò, which is proposed as a traversal and a broad reconnaissance in his creative and aesthetic path from the 1960s to today. A rich exhibition that unravels from the first erasures of books, dated 1964, and continues with the visual poems on emulsified canvases and the Red Stories, to the imposing and articulate erased texts in the historical volumes of L’Enciclopedia Treccani, 1970, to the ethnic ones of the Ottoman Codices, 2010.

Isgrò’s experimental and linguistic journey, in an unprecedented and spectacular way, will be inscribed in an encompassing and enveloping architectural setting. In fact, the rooms of the Foundation’sNapoleonic Wing, enriched by transverse and diagonal walls, used to break up and modify the space as if they were lines on a sheet of paper, will function as paper supports that will convey a huge and new erasure operation, conducted once again on literary material, so that the public will enter a large book, visually modified by the artist.

The choice of the text that will flow on the surfaces of the exhibition envelope has fallen on the novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville, so as to imply a fantastic transit in the belly of a cetacean, that of erasing words and writings that made Isgrò famous: “The theme I am tackling for this exhibition at the Fondazione Cini in Venice, the city where the first erasures were born in 1964, can only be that of language. This is why it seemed necessary to me to turn to the biblical tradition filtered through Moby Dick, Melville’s wonderful novel,” explains Emilio Isgrò. "It will be Melville’s erased work that will therefore contain all the others, and those who enter the exhibition will allow themselves to be accompanied into the belly of the whale, that is, the belly of media language that covers with noise its own real and despairing silence.

The exhibition benefits from the presence of works from important public and private, national and international collections, among which stand out Il Cristo cancellatore, 1968, an installation composed of 38 erased volumes, from the Centre Pompidou in Paris; Carta geografica, 1970, from the Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto; Storico, erased book from 1972, from the Galleria Nazionale d’ Modern Art, Rome; the monumental erased map Weltanschauung, 2007, 9 meters long, from the Centro d’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato; four precious works from the Gallerie d’Italia Collection; Poesia Volkswagen, 1964, from the Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione, Parma; and the red History The Race of Alma, 1969, from the Museo Civico Giovanni Fattori, Livorno.

The anthological exhibition is accompanied by a volume, published by the Treccani publishing house, which includes, in addition to deleted pages from Moby Dick and an interview between the artist and the curator, an extensive illustrated chronology that delves into and documents Isgrò’s personal and professional journey.

Emilio Isgrò, a painter but also a poet and novelist (and formerly a journalist), is one of the most internationally known and prestigious names in Italian art. Isgrò created some of the most revolutionary and original work within the so-called second avant-gardes of the 1960s, which earned him several participations in the Venice Biennale (1972, 1978, 1986, 1993) andfirst prize at the São Paulo Biennale (1977), as well as other important exhibitions at MoMA in New York in 1992 and at the Fondazione Peggy Guggenheim in Venice in 1994, and anthological shows at the Centro per l’Contemporary Art Luigi Pecci in Prato in 2008, at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome in 2013 and at the Palazzo Reale in Milan in 2016.

In 1998, he made an Orange Seed for his hometown. In 2011, he executed, for Luigi Bocconi University in Milan, the work Cancellazione del debito pubblico, and for Expo Milano 2015 a seven-meter-high marble sculpture, Il Seme dell’Altissimo. The initiator of the “erasures” of texts, applied to encyclopedias, manuscripts, books, maps and even film films, Isgrò has made this practice the pivot of all his research. In 2017 he exhibited in London and Paris, and the same year, three of his important works (including the famous 1969 installation of The Christ Eraser ) became part of the permanent collection of the Centre George Pompidou in Paris. The year concludes with Fondamenta per un’arte civile at the Milan Triennale; an entire day dedicated to the artist that sees him as the protagonist of the presentation of his latest book, Autocurriculum, published by Sellerio; the inauguration of the exhibition I multipli secondo Isgrò, promoted by the Treccani Group; and finally the ceremony for the permanent placement of Il Seme dell’Altissimo in the spaces in front of the Triennale. In 2018 Isgrò inaugurates the work Monument to Hell, created especially for the IULM University of Milan. In April he exhibits in Belgium at MDZ Art Gallery, in a double solo show featuring him together with Christo. In summer he opens Lettere, a dialogue exhibition between the artist and Osvaldo Licini at the Centro Studi Casa Museo Osvaldo Licini in Monte Vidon Corrado.

The exhibition is made possible with the contribution of Intesa Sanpaolo - Direzione Arte, Cultura e Beni Storici in the Scope of Progetto Cultura.

For all information you can visit the official website of the Foundation.

Pictured, Emilio Isgrò at work (March 2019). Ph. Credit Andrea Valentini

Venice, the major exhibition on Emilio Isgrò, curated by Germano Celant, at the Cini Foundation

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