"Pop artist, intellectual, connoisseur of the past: who was my father Concetto Pozzati"

It recently opened in Bologna, at Palazzo Fava. Palazzo delle Esposizioni, the exhibition Concetto Pozzati XXL, the first anthological exhibition dedicated to Concetto Pozzati (Vo’ Vecchio, Padua, 1935 - Bologna, 2017) in a museum venue since his passing. Curated by Maura Pozzati, the artist’s daughter, curator and director of the Concetto Pozzati Archive, the exhibition is presented by Genus Bononiae, together with Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna. In this interview, the President of Genus Bononiae, Filippo Sassoli de’ Bianchi, and curator Maura Pozzati talk about various aspects of the exhibition, which aims to restore for the first time a complete image of Concetto Pozzati: not only a visual artist, but a well-rounded intellectual.

IB. How did you take the decision, as curator and director of the Concetto Pozzati Archive and as the artist’s daughter, to dedicate an anthological exhibition in Bologna, promoted by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna and Genus Bononiae, to Concetto Pozzati?

MP. Actually, things turned out differently and in a very unexpected way: I had gone Palazzo Fava to a meeting with Genus Bononiae’s managing director, Dr. Gianandrea Rocco di Torrepadula, to propose to him an exhibition of works on paper by my father, Concetto Pozzati, during Arte Fiera and ART CITY Bologna, with Santa Maria della Vita in mind. During the conversation, talking about the Concetto Pozzati Archive-established by me and my brother Jacopo in 2020-Dr. Rocco di Torrepadula proposed a larger exhibition. Obviously I came out of that meeting very happy, the time was coming to exhibit important works by my father in a beautiful historical building in Bologna, six years after his passing. So I came up with the idea of resuming an old project that my father had failed to materialize and exhibiting unpublished and little-seen large paintings, all owned by the Archives.

How would you describe your father’s art?

It is a misleading question, difficult to describe the art of a painter, as my father liked to call himself. Concetto Pozzati always worked in cycles and never repeated himself, he always changed his skin in order not to be homologated, not to give in to the flattery of the market, to be free and against the tide, out of fashion. His writings are illuminating in this sense: and if we really have to describe his fundamental art, it is to read what he wrote: “Art is always questioning and is always unspeakable...The important thing is to be outside the conformity of both representation and presentation because art is the creation of difference.”

What was it like as a daughter to curate an exhibition chronicling your father’s entire career? Did your private relationship or any memories also influence the selection of works?

Curating this Concetto Pozzati XXL exhibition in such an important space, a real house of painting, was exciting, and the emotional tension made me spend sleepless nights, but I always had the feeling that Concetto Pozzati’s large-format paintings, especially the 6-meter diptychs that he kept for himself and did not offer for sale, would have dialogued perfectly with the frescoes by Carracci, Ludovico, Cesi, and Albani. For the selection of the works and the choice of the paintings on the main floor I exclusively reasoned on the relationship with the rooms of the Palazzo, with the friezes, with the furniture, with the floors, really looking for a loving consonance between Concetto’s painting, so iconic and pop, and that sedimented in the rooms of Palazzo Fava. On the upper floor, on the other hand, I thought of exhibiting only the works on paper, because for my father drawing was as important as painting, and to think of a large Pozzati exhibition without the graphic part was really unthinkable: “Drawing is not an exercise but a thought, an idea, an eidetic gymnastics thickened by the gymnastics of the eye that spies in the surroundings of the sign between pauses. It is an imaginary cartography, sometimes exasperated by repentance and by obstacles, reminders, accumulations, overlaps. Drawing is a necessity...,” wrote Concetto Pozzati.

How is the exhibition route structured?

The exhibition itinerary, as already mentioned, is based on the dialogue between artists that bypasses time and centuries: therefore, it is not a chronological path but based on specific choices in relation to the spaces. During the visit, one encounters works that are part of different cycles but that trace a circular path, culminating in the last room, the one dedicated to Dido’s suicide, where two pop works from the 1960s stand together with two paintings from the last cycle painted by the artist during his lifetime dedicated to vulvas, precisely to emphasize the same intensity of gesture, the same chromatic and symbolic research, and the love for making painting.

On display, as evidence of one of the main phases of Concetto Pozzati’s career, are works that can be traced back to the Pop period. What does Concetto Pozzati’s Pop Art look like? By what trait does it stand out?

Concetto Pozzati is a sui generis Pop artist: for him, Pop Art was not an artistic trend but an idea, a reflection on the concept of commodification. My father always talked about private images that clashed with public-cartoonistic ones, exchanging sides between what is public and what is private. An example is the much-quoted pear (which was the one in the “derby-pear” poster) that used by Pozzati became the Pozzati pear. That is, the product united in itself all linguistic contradictions, and the artist’s task was to carry out investigations into public and private, objective and subjective language in order to create communicative “suspense.”

In some works personal memory and historical memory become part of the work itself: in the cycle Outside the Door for example, the artist inserts old photographs, letter envelopes, postcards, sketches. What was his relationship with public history and personal memories? In both cases a dialogue with time takes place....

For Pozzati, looking at the past means looking at it through the eyes and problematics of the contemporary and the present. History and art history became for him an ever-present “critical moment,” any material to be used, stolen, quoted, plundered. If he dredges up something from the past Pozzati does so without nostalgia, because, as he writes: “The ’memories’ (not the nostalgias) have crowded and settled. It is true that everything changes, even the already seen, the already done, the already experienced depending on the observation, the window of observation. Reconstructing each time differently from what we were in that we are who we are today.”

"After everything where everything floats, where everything is the same because everything has been done, because everything can be done, because there is no chasing or planning for the new and the future . Aninventory of the end, a catalog on the non-difference of signs and images," writes Pozzati recalling the title of one of his most famous works, After Everything, made in 1980, consisting of 301 drawings and present in the exhibition. What was his relationship with the future? And how did he try to overcome the “everything that had already been done”?

The large installation After the Whole that we have remounted at Palazzo Fava in a new guise, consisting of 301 drawings enclosed in Plexiglas boxes, is really a Pozzatian inventory, a kind of large repertoire of quotations and self-quotations that well highlight the propensity to loot images that my father repeatedly perpetrated. Called the “privateer of painting” for this his recourse to iconographic apparatuses from the history of art, from the Diderot and D’Alembert encyclopedia, from his own earlier painting, the artist always claimed the right of robbery: numerous in this work are the references to painters of the past, many the quotations of drawings from his own private collection, frequent the images from the animal and natural world, copious the self-quotations: all made possible by that technique of collage so beloved by Concetto, which allowed him to align and float icons, things, silhouettes, relics, old photographs, bits of paper, stains of colors, drips and staples on the same sheet of paper. On the other hand, I can’t answer what his relationship with the future was at that time; my brother had been born two years before, he had found a new studio finally out of the house, where he moved in 1979 and where he created in 1982 the very large painting The Valdonica Nativity for the Venice Biennale...I guess he was taken by these big novelties.

In addition to Pozzati the artist, the exhibition aims to introduce visitors to the well-rounded intellectual. How is this aspect made known in the exhibition itinerary?

Actually, the well-rounded intellectual, the fine thinker, the sharp art critic that my father was to all intents and purposes (as well as a great teacher) comes out not so much in the exhibition as in the catalog published by Maretti, where the works are published in chronological order and are self-presented by Concetto Pozzati himself through his corresponding writing. The catalog allowed me to do what was very difficult in the exhibition, that is, to bring out his powerful and countercultural, polemical and poetic voice at the same time and to republish most of his writings dedicated to the different pictorial cycles.

What kind of audience does the exhibition aim to address? And how has it been received by the public in this first opening period?

The exhibition is meant for all kinds of audiences for several reasons: first of all, the place, its intrinsic beauty, the fact that it is visited as Palazzo Fava frescoed by the Carraccis, regardless of the current exhibition; then because this is the first major solo exhibition organized in a museum space after the artist’s death and therefore designed to tell more than fifty years of his work, going through various phases and cycles, including unpublished ones that have never left the Archives before; and finally because it is an exhibition that lends itself to educational activities with schools and with younger children, who can really enjoy “playing” with Concetto Pozzati.

So far I have received many positive comments and many compliments, we really hope it will be visited by all those who love painting, driven by curiosity to meet an original and out-of-the-box artist who absolutely must be reevaluated within the art market and reconsidered as a key figure within the history of contemporary art.

Courtesy of the

On concession from the

Courtesy of the

On concession from the

Courtesy of the

Courtesy of the Concetto Pozzati

Courtesy of the

IB. How did the idea of dedicating an exhibition to Concetto Pozzati come about?

FSdB. As told by the curator, Maura Pozzati, it all came out of a conversation. An exhibition of drawings was proposed to us, but it immediately became clear to us that such an important figure in the cultural history of our city deserved to be celebrated with a larger exhibition that would be able to tell the whole story of his career as an artist. I emphasize that the exhibition was made possible thanks to the collaboration with the Concetto Pozzati Archive, from which all the works on display come.

Is the exhibition at Palazzo Fava part of the reconnaissance program that Genus Bononiae is carrying out in order to make important artists in the area known and to learn more about them? How is it proceeding in this direction?

The popularization and promotion of Bolognese artists is among the primary goals that Fondazione Carisbo pursues, and therefore also Genus Bononiae, as its instrumental company. Last year we dedicated an exhibition to Bruno Pulga (1922-1993) on the centenary of his birth; this year, in addition to the major exhibition on Concetto Pozzati, we have done an important research work on the painter Ilario Rossi (1911-1994), which has allowed us to create an exhibition in the spaces of Santa Maria della Vita (from November 10, 2023 to February 4, 2024). The goal of these exhibitions is to enhance the artistic personalities who were formed in our territory, and whomade their creative journey here, making accessible to citizens and tourists a heritage that speaks of the history of our city.

Who will be the next artists linked to the territory to whom other exhibitions along these lines will be dedicated?

After Concetto Pozzati XXL, an exhibition dedicated to nineteenth-century Bologna is planned at Palazzo Fava, in which it will be possible to admire works by artists such as Pelagio Palagi, Antonio Basoli and Alessandro Guardassoni, all from the Collections of the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna. The exhibition is part of a larger citywide program of revisiting this historical period, carried out by the Museo Civico del Risorgimento. In fact, we are always very pleased when virtuous synergies can be created with other entities in the area, because Bologna is a city that has so much to offer, as confirmed also by the increase in tourism that has been recorded in recent years.

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