Between stories of excess, transgression and worldliness, the protagonists of the lively artistic atmosphere of new New York like Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, Keith Haring, Julian Schnabel and Jeff Koons, with about 150 works from September 29th will be at Palazzo Albergati in Bologna in the Warhol&Friends exhibition. New York in the 80s.

The ’80s have their own way of doing politics in an explosion of colors and figures where art is not just a visual experience; a decade that has seen combining art, music, cinema and literature – in the moment in which galleries and the international market decree the resounding success of the return to painting – Warhol arrives in Bologna, Haring with Untitled (1983), Schnabel with Dunciad (Trances of Bouboul) of 1983, Koons with Art Magazine Ads (1989), Basquiat with Untitled (1983) and Bertoglio with Grace Jones and Madonna (1983).

On show with 36 works and 38 polaroids Andy Warhol who, after being the victim of a terrible attack in 1968, at the beginning of the 80s returns to the center of the artistic and social life of New York realizing some of his most interesting cycles featured on display such as Shoes, Hammer & Sickle, Camouflage, Lenin, Joseph Beuys, Vesuvius, Knives.

Under the patronage of the Emilia Romagna Region and the Comune di Bologna, the exhibition Warhol & Friends. New York in the 80s is produced and organized by the Arthemisia Group and curated by Luca Beatrice.

For further information: www.palazzoalbergati.com

Collezione Maramotti presents Field, the first solo exhibition in Italy by English artist Phoebe Unwin, featuring a series of new paintings made specifically for its Pattern Room.

The title of the show holds many different connotations. The “field” could be a landscape, but also a color field, or the field of vision. It is an in-between place, a traditional subject in painting, which allows the artist to hover between figuration and abstraction, to investigate the formal aspects of her medium. Investigating the concept of landscape and how the human figure interacts with its surroundings, Unwin uses painting to construct a delicate alternation of horizons, whose varying distances elicit different paces of observation. The layered, porous surface of her works and hazy depiction of her subjects also generate a dynamic kind of vision within each painting, and an intimate link between the works.

The starting point for the entire project is a painting from 2017, Approach, which shows a suspended encounter between two people; here and there, their outlines blur into the landscape, which is thus moulded by perception.

Unwin invites us to reflect on the complexity of small, seemingly trivial moments, while she probes and pushes the boundaries of painting as a means of expression.

Rather than drawing inspiration from photographs, or from the sea of images that flow through the web, the artists works from personal memories or from the drawing pads where she sketches her everyday life.

For further information: www.collezionemaramotti.org

This exhibition is a great tale about a key year of the twentieth century, returned through a survey inside the CSAC archive, whose first nucleus was born in 1968 and which today, fifty years later, boasts a collection of over 12 million original content in the field of visual communication and Italian artistic and design research since the early decades of the twentieth century.

Through ideas, utopias, works, projects, and objects dated or related to the year 1968, this exhibition shows the evolution of the communication system, the socio-anthropological changes (new myths and new rituals), and a new reflection on the body and on the environment. Different fields of study and languages are thus combined to tackle the contamination and the coexistence of diversified cultures.

The reflection on the body is represented at different scales: from jewels to dresses, from the conception of new places of youth culture to the redefinition of the scene and the reappropriation of the public space. The comparison of multiple systems of symbols and iconographies occurs through posters, clothing projects, gestures’ representations, and photographic reports.

1968. One year exhibition does not want to suggest a univocal look, but a series of contradictions, comparisons and new perspectives, proposing a reflection on time and on the concept of synchrony that a large archive consisting of traces of the processes of conception, planning, and implementation is able to question.

For further information: www.csacparma.it

The exhibition From Expressionism to the new objectivity. Avant-gardes in Germany, in the Governor’s Palace of Parma, proposes 40 works by the major representatives of this cultural and artistic current, developed in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century, coming from the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal (Germany), which hosts one of the most impressive collections of German Expressionism and artistic trends of the period after the First World War.

The exhibition itinerary is developed in two main sections.

The first focuses on German Expressionism, presenting paradigmatic works mostly from the group of artists of Die Brücke (The Bridge) of Dresden, such as Kirchner, Heckel, Mueller, of the Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Knight), including Kandinskij, Marc, Jawlensky, Macke and Der Sturm (The Tempest), the art and gallery magazine based in Berlin, with authors such as Davringhausen, Beckmann, Grossberg.

The second one offers the overview of the aesthetic changes in the post-war years, when artists such as Hofer, Viegener, Dix, Ernst, Adler, representatives of the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) created, under the influence of the new Rationalism and Functionalism, the “Metaphysical Painting” and the Neo-Classicism of the so-called “Ritorno all’ordine” developed in Italy, a new artistic atmosphere that reflects the disillusionment of the generation that experienced the war and the consequent loss of human lives and the destruction of European cities.

“The exhibition – says the curator, Lorand Hegyi – thanks to the generous and highly professional collaboration with the Director of the Von Der Heydt Museum, Dr. Gerhard Finckh and his colleagues, proposes a study of such an important artistic movement that more than 100 years after his birth still sends an aesthetic and ethical message that is extremely direct and essential through an empathic language that effectively transmits touching, dramatic and spiritual messages”.

For further information: www.emiliaromagnaturismo.it/it/eventi/parma/parma/dall2019espressionismo-alla-nuova-oggettivita-avanguardie-in-germania 

A major retrospective dedicated to Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985), one of the greatest artists of the XX century. The exhibition explores the numerous creative cycles, the vast researches and artist’s experiments.

On display are 140 works among paintings, drawings, artworks, sculptures, art books, musical, poetical and theatrical writings mainly coming from Fondation Dubuffet and Paris-based Musée des Arts Décoratif, as well as from museums and private collections of France, Switzerland, Austria and Italy, in addition to 30 works of historic protagonists of art brut, in cooperation with Giorgio Bedoni.

There are three main sections, based on the dialectics between the two notions of material and spirit. The first section, 1945-1960, presents the cycles around the material, from Mirobolus, Macadam et Cie to Matériologies; the second section dates back to the years 1962-1974, with the works of L’Hourloupe collection, created from a drawing made mechanically on the phone, that will have turned into a monumental sculpture 12 years later.

The third section explores the new horizon of intense chromatism, that developed through the Théâtres de mémoire and the Non-lieux from 1976 to 1984.

For further information: www.palazzomagnani.it/

The La vita materiale (Corporeal life) exhibition inaugurates a new season of contemporary art in the Palazzo Magnani Foundation presenting the research of eight Italian artists united by the employment and regeneration of materials often humble and traditionally associated with crafts that find an original space in their artistic work. The intent of the exhibition is the desire to enhance a female artistic practice that cleverly connects the artistic path to personal experience and the link between art and life in all its complexity and fertility.

The exhibition route aims to involve and interrogate the five senses, because our experience of the real world passes through the body which creates a synesthesia with its surroundings. It is a body-world; for this reason at the opening of the exhibition “the tree of the body” perceived and told by Claudia Losi and the velarium on a “body landscape”, staged by Elena El Asmar, become a happy prologue to the eight rooms.

The spectator is invited to discover eight habitats, eight environments to which each artist has given a title; rooms like cocoons, in which each of the creators has proposed their own world and in which it clearly appears that matter, in its transformation processes, is something “organic” and vital. They present themselves in a confident manner, which does not distort and intimidate the visitor, but which favors his ability to venture into the game of discovery.

The exhibition offers interesting connections with the anthological exhibition that Palazzo Magnani dedicates, at the same time, to Jean Dubuffet.

For further information: www.palazzomagnani.it

An exhibition dedicated to Via Aemilia, the consular road that has left its mark in the name of the city, who has always been a leader along which they have met different people, ideas and cultures, contributing to the formation of an open city facing the future.

For further information: musei.re.it/2017-2-200-anni-sulla-via-emilia

An exhibition proposal for comparison with the works of the other civic art gallery, the Gallery of Anna and Luigi Parmeggiani.

We do not want to legitimize the hypothesis of a synthesis between the two collections, which was however strongly advocated in the sixties and periodically re-emerging in the city’s debate. Nothing is common between the two art galleries of the city, distant for history, collecting events, patrimonial consistency. The one, the Gallery dedicated to Antonio Fontanesi, preserves the artistic heritage linked to the city, the result of numerous episodes of commissions, donations, acquisitions closely linked to Reggio Emilia and the territory; the other, the gallery inaugurated by Luigi Parmeggiani in 1934, is the result of his acrobatic attendance of the European artistic-antiquarian world of the late nineteenth century, between excellences and consolidated values, equivocal reappropriations and uninhibited reconstructions, today legitimized by the passing of the centuries.

For further information visit: www.musei.re.it/appuntamenti/face-to-face-collezioni-a-confronto/

With the exhibition Regium Lepidi Underground in Via Emilia San Pietro 6, Credem opens the doors of the only archaeological site that can be visited in Reggio Emilia, housed in its headquarters, Palazzo Spalletti Trivelli.
The exhibition completes the route of the exhibitions that celebrate the 2200th anniversary of the construction of Via Emilia in the city, On the Road. Via Emilia 187 a.C. – 2017, at the Civic Museums and Ego Sum Via. Via Aemilia. Via Christi at the Diocesan Museum.

The title of the exhibition is an invitation to go down “underground”, under the ground, to admire the heart of Roman Reggio Emilia, then called Regium Lepidi. At a depth of three and a half meters below the level of the current Via Emilia, in fact, are preserved the ruins of the area of the Roman Forum, dating from the second century BC. C. to the fourth century, where you can see the impressive remains of a large public building, the Basilica, the civil court of the Roman city, and another impressive building, identified by archaeologists as part of the city’s defensive walls or as a base of the city temple.

Visitors will be invited to discover the history of an entire block of Regium Lepidi, from a production site attested by the existence of potters’ shops (around 175 BC), a residential area with the presence of domus, ornate stately homes from elegant mosaics, in the I sec. to. C. At the end of the first century AD C. the area was included in the Forum and was transformed into the nerve center of city power, with the construction of public buildings of which the imposing traces are still visible.

The events of the archaeological site will be deepened thanks to the presence of findings found during the excavation, carried out between 1980 and 1983, which for the first time return to the place where they were found. In addition to these works, some panels with elegant mosaic floors from the excavation carried out in 1958 in the San Rocco Isolation area will also be exhibited. The variety of the presented works will allow deepening several aspects related to the construction techniques of the Roman era.

For further information: www.credem.it/content/credem/it/spazio-credem/regium_lepidi_underground.html

In her first European exhibition Painting Piece-By-Piece the American painter Sally Ross presents five large works from 2013 to 2015, recently acquired by the Maramotti Collection.

The paintings on display reveal their components and how they came together, the thinking and handwork involved, yet retaining an enigmatic quality, somehow elusive and direct. The very foundation of Ross’s work is within the reality of where her art comes into being: the studio, and in particular the studio floor, on which her work is initially composed like a map unfolding in various directions, fitted together from any number of pieces and sewn into place, a sort of cubist quilting.

The artist stands above the image-composition, which we may see as an aerial view of a landscape, and she begins to stitch the pieces together. There is a three-dimensionality, not only with the sculptural protrusions in some of the paintings, but with what appears as blocks of a faceted structure.

For further information: www.collezionemaramotti.org/en/exhibition-detail