Exhibition review: ROMA 60 at Sprovieri
Sprovieri's latest exhibition charts the melting pot of artistic ideas that was 20th Century Rome...
By
Shin Hui Lee
January 26, 2023
Images of Rome in the 1960s have always been easy to conjure, whether in the form of Federico Fellini’s sumptuous black-and-white frames or paparazzi shots of celebrities like Brigitte Bardot traipsing along the city’s cobbled streets. The continued resonance of such images is no doubt a result of Italy’s post-war ‘Il Boom’, during which Rome in particular began to teem with an unprecedented richness and tremendousness of life. Artists, writers and filmmakers flocked to the capital, coalescing different cultural, social and political ideas in the hopes of reimagining society amidst their newfound freedom. In this way, Rome birthed a myriad of new art movements along with a whole new way of living- that of ‘la dolce vita’.
The problem, if you can call it that, with the notion of ‘la dolce vita’ is that it lends itself to being mythologised by virtue of its own fantastic nature. Retrospective awe perhaps clouding appreciation for actual, lived history.
ROMA 60 is a joy of an exhibition as it offers a compelling yet unsentimental lens into the reality of this era. As Rome stood as the epicentre of artistic experimentation in the 1960s, there were several artists who assiduously challenged the purpose and meaning of art itself. Nine of their seminal works now collectively occupy Sprovieri’s gallery space.
A lucid thread runs throughout the exhibition, with each artwork offering a key to understanding the experience of arte informale and its influence on later movements such as arte povera, pop art and avant-garde art. Arte informale refers to a type of abstraction whereby the expressive impulses of the artist are considered in favour of traditional prescriptions of form. Characterised mainly by spontaneous execution and highly gestural techniques, the intention was to extend art beyond its rigid constraints and to show that there was value to be found in the relationship between material, subject and the world at large.
This is most evident in the works of Alberto Burri, who first pushed forward the possibility of materials being ends rather than just means to the creation of art. In Burri’s Pittura (1951) on display here, the canvas is plastered with a black tar-like substance, its surface scabbed and marred by pumice stone to the point of disfiguration, giving way only to dark patches and dripping lines of enamel paint. According to Guggenheim curator Emily Braun, Burri was the “artist of wounds…attacking the supports, and surfaces, the very structure of what a canvas is…we feel these materials as if we’re feeling these textures in our own body.”. For Burri, the imposed primacy of materiality in his paintings was far from an arbitrary choice, rather one made exigent by and through his trauma as a war prisoner. By attacking his canvas, Burri was attacking not just the ‘high art’ rules of painting that he deemed no longer conducive to expressing the growing existentialist angst of the post-war period, but also the very violence, poverty and futility of war itself. Pittura was a revelation insofar as it highlighted how it was only through such primacy of materiality that Burri’s subsequent disfiguration of it was capable of invoking such visceral, innate reactions.
The contextualisation of materiality continues in Fabio Mauri’s Schermo (1958-59). Developed around a suspicion of the ubiquity of media, Mauri’s screens are presented as white and empty, allowing for infinitesimal possible projections in place of the kind of regular, scheduled programming that we may be accustomed to in our daily lives. We are privy only to what we independently project upon the screens, preventing any commonality that would make possible the interpretation of an objective reality and thereby obfuscating the lines between fact and memory, truth and fabrication. So, through Scherma, Mauri poses the central critique of the insidiousness of mass media and its tendency to corrupt our fundamental perceptions of reality. It is uncanny that six decades on, we find ourselves still entangled in the ethical conundrums of living in an increasingly media-driven and technology-based society. Schermo is perhaps the most resonant work in the exhibition for both the prescience of its subject matter and its closeness to conceptual art as we understand it today.
More radically, Giuseppe Uncini’s Cementarmato (1959) moves towards the principle that material in fact no longer exists. The convention at the time of “transposing and modifying the meaning of the materials in such a way as to turn everything into painting” was too limiting for Uncini in the sense that even upon emphasising the primacy of materiality, the very nature of a painting could only ever allude to some other reality, never able to stand alone as a representation or bearing of itself. In choosing to replace the wooden stretcher with steel rods, and the white canvas with cement for Cementarmato, Uncini was able to successfully collapse that stubborn representational divide and reinstate a “self-evident unity to the work of art, derived and described by the material itself.”.Cementarmato emerges as a personal favourite in this exhibition, for the sheer singularity and tenacity of artistic imagination that Uncini managed to convey through it.
In a similar departure from painting, Ettore Colla’s Meridiana (Cerchio con sbarra e valvola) (1966) and Meridiana Quadrata (1968) reflect the use of unorthodox sculptural mediums as an assertion of both the inherent utility and beauty of natural materials. The iron assemblages appear here in stark purity- their perfect geometry bringing forth the intrinsic physicality and dynamism of their raw properties. While lacking in the political provocation characteristic of other artists of the movement, Colla was more concerned with a focused exploration of spatial forms and relationships. In a world lurched into an unpredictable period of transition, Colla’s works could be understood as being driven by the desire to yield multitudinous aspects of a disarrayed reality to exacting structures and thought processes from which stability may most typically be borne. The Meridianas exist as enduring meditations upon such a desire.
ROMA 60 may be modest in its collection, but the artworks acquired here are remarkably abundant in what they stand for. Taken as a whole, they make up a perfect introduction to the arte informale movement dominating Rome in the 1960s. Sprovieri’s gallery space opens up wonderfully for this exhibition, enabling us to encounter the artworks holistically, discovering the various idiosyncrasies and interpolations between them.
ROMA 60 is on view at Sprovieri until 24th March 2023. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Images of Rome in the 1960s have always been easy to conjure, whether in the form of Federico Fellini’s sumptuous black-and-white frames or paparazzi shots of celebrities like Brigitte Bardot traipsing along the city’s cobbled streets. The continued resonance of such images is no doubt a result of Italy’s post-war ‘Il Boom’, during which Rome in particular began to teem with an unprecedented richness and tremendousness of life. Artists, writers and filmmakers flocked to the capital, coalescing different cultural, social and political ideas in the hopes of reimagining society amidst their newfound freedom. In this way, Rome birthed a myriad of new art movements along with a whole new way of living- that of ‘la dolce vita’.
The problem, if you can call it that, with the notion of ‘la dolce vita’ is that it lends itself to being mythologised by virtue of its own fantastic nature. Retrospective awe perhaps clouding appreciation for actual, lived history.
ROMA 60 is a joy of an exhibition as it offers a compelling yet unsentimental lens into the reality of this era. As Rome stood as the epicentre of artistic experimentation in the 1960s, there were several artists who assiduously challenged the purpose and meaning of art itself. Nine of their seminal works now collectively occupy Sprovieri’s gallery space.
A lucid thread runs throughout the exhibition, with each artwork offering a key to understanding the experience of arte informale and its influence on later movements such as arte povera, pop art and avant-garde art. Arte informale refers to a type of abstraction whereby the expressive impulses of the artist are considered in favour of traditional prescriptions of form. Characterised mainly by spontaneous execution and highly gestural techniques, the intention was to extend art beyond its rigid constraints and to show that there was value to be found in the relationship between material, subject and the world at large.
This is most evident in the works of Alberto Burri, who first pushed forward the possibility of materials being ends rather than just means to the creation of art. In Burri’s Pittura (1951) on display here, the canvas is plastered with a black tar-like substance, its surface scabbed and marred by pumice stone to the point of disfiguration, giving way only to dark patches and dripping lines of enamel paint. According to Guggenheim curator Emily Braun, Burri was the “artist of wounds…attacking the supports, and surfaces, the very structure of what a canvas is…we feel these materials as if we’re feeling these textures in our own body.”. For Burri, the imposed primacy of materiality in his paintings was far from an arbitrary choice, rather one made exigent by and through his trauma as a war prisoner. By attacking his canvas, Burri was attacking not just the ‘high art’ rules of painting that he deemed no longer conducive to expressing the growing existentialist angst of the post-war period, but also the very violence, poverty and futility of war itself. Pittura was a revelation insofar as it highlighted how it was only through such primacy of materiality that Burri’s subsequent disfiguration of it was capable of invoking such visceral, innate reactions.
The contextualisation of materiality continues in Fabio Mauri’s Schermo (1958-59). Developed around a suspicion of the ubiquity of media, Mauri’s screens are presented as white and empty, allowing for infinitesimal possible projections in place of the kind of regular, scheduled programming that we may be accustomed to in our daily lives. We are privy only to what we independently project upon the screens, preventing any commonality that would make possible the interpretation of an objective reality and thereby obfuscating the lines between fact and memory, truth and fabrication. So, through Scherma, Mauri poses the central critique of the insidiousness of mass media and its tendency to corrupt our fundamental perceptions of reality. It is uncanny that six decades on, we find ourselves still entangled in the ethical conundrums of living in an increasingly media-driven and technology-based society. Schermo is perhaps the most resonant work in the exhibition for both the prescience of its subject matter and its closeness to conceptual art as we understand it today.
More radically, Giuseppe Uncini’s Cementarmato (1959) moves towards the principle that material in fact no longer exists. The convention at the time of “transposing and modifying the meaning of the materials in such a way as to turn everything into painting” was too limiting for Uncini in the sense that even upon emphasising the primacy of materiality, the very nature of a painting could only ever allude to some other reality, never able to stand alone as a representation or bearing of itself. In choosing to replace the wooden stretcher with steel rods, and the white canvas with cement for Cementarmato, Uncini was able to successfully collapse that stubborn representational divide and reinstate a “self-evident unity to the work of art, derived and described by the material itself.”.Cementarmato emerges as a personal favourite in this exhibition, for the sheer singularity and tenacity of artistic imagination that Uncini managed to convey through it.
In a similar departure from painting, Ettore Colla’s Meridiana (Cerchio con sbarra e valvola) (1966) and Meridiana Quadrata (1968) reflect the use of unorthodox sculptural mediums as an assertion of both the inherent utility and beauty of natural materials. The iron assemblages appear here in stark purity- their perfect geometry bringing forth the intrinsic physicality and dynamism of their raw properties. While lacking in the political provocation characteristic of other artists of the movement, Colla was more concerned with a focused exploration of spatial forms and relationships. In a world lurched into an unpredictable period of transition, Colla’s works could be understood as being driven by the desire to yield multitudinous aspects of a disarrayed reality to exacting structures and thought processes from which stability may most typically be borne. The Meridianas exist as enduring meditations upon such a desire.
ROMA 60 may be modest in its collection, but the artworks acquired here are remarkably abundant in what they stand for. Taken as a whole, they make up a perfect introduction to the arte informale movement dominating Rome in the 1960s. Sprovieri’s gallery space opens up wonderfully for this exhibition, enabling us to encounter the artworks holistically, discovering the various idiosyncrasies and interpolations between them.
ROMA 60 is on view at Sprovieri until 24th March 2023. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Images of Rome in the 1960s have always been easy to conjure, whether in the form of Federico Fellini’s sumptuous black-and-white frames or paparazzi shots of celebrities like Brigitte Bardot traipsing along the city’s cobbled streets. The continued resonance of such images is no doubt a result of Italy’s post-war ‘Il Boom’, during which Rome in particular began to teem with an unprecedented richness and tremendousness of life. Artists, writers and filmmakers flocked to the capital, coalescing different cultural, social and political ideas in the hopes of reimagining society amidst their newfound freedom. In this way, Rome birthed a myriad of new art movements along with a whole new way of living- that of ‘la dolce vita’.
The problem, if you can call it that, with the notion of ‘la dolce vita’ is that it lends itself to being mythologised by virtue of its own fantastic nature. Retrospective awe perhaps clouding appreciation for actual, lived history.
ROMA 60 is a joy of an exhibition as it offers a compelling yet unsentimental lens into the reality of this era. As Rome stood as the epicentre of artistic experimentation in the 1960s, there were several artists who assiduously challenged the purpose and meaning of art itself. Nine of their seminal works now collectively occupy Sprovieri’s gallery space.
A lucid thread runs throughout the exhibition, with each artwork offering a key to understanding the experience of arte informale and its influence on later movements such as arte povera, pop art and avant-garde art. Arte informale refers to a type of abstraction whereby the expressive impulses of the artist are considered in favour of traditional prescriptions of form. Characterised mainly by spontaneous execution and highly gestural techniques, the intention was to extend art beyond its rigid constraints and to show that there was value to be found in the relationship between material, subject and the world at large.
This is most evident in the works of Alberto Burri, who first pushed forward the possibility of materials being ends rather than just means to the creation of art. In Burri’s Pittura (1951) on display here, the canvas is plastered with a black tar-like substance, its surface scabbed and marred by pumice stone to the point of disfiguration, giving way only to dark patches and dripping lines of enamel paint. According to Guggenheim curator Emily Braun, Burri was the “artist of wounds…attacking the supports, and surfaces, the very structure of what a canvas is…we feel these materials as if we’re feeling these textures in our own body.”. For Burri, the imposed primacy of materiality in his paintings was far from an arbitrary choice, rather one made exigent by and through his trauma as a war prisoner. By attacking his canvas, Burri was attacking not just the ‘high art’ rules of painting that he deemed no longer conducive to expressing the growing existentialist angst of the post-war period, but also the very violence, poverty and futility of war itself. Pittura was a revelation insofar as it highlighted how it was only through such primacy of materiality that Burri’s subsequent disfiguration of it was capable of invoking such visceral, innate reactions.
The contextualisation of materiality continues in Fabio Mauri’s Schermo (1958-59). Developed around a suspicion of the ubiquity of media, Mauri’s screens are presented as white and empty, allowing for infinitesimal possible projections in place of the kind of regular, scheduled programming that we may be accustomed to in our daily lives. We are privy only to what we independently project upon the screens, preventing any commonality that would make possible the interpretation of an objective reality and thereby obfuscating the lines between fact and memory, truth and fabrication. So, through Scherma, Mauri poses the central critique of the insidiousness of mass media and its tendency to corrupt our fundamental perceptions of reality. It is uncanny that six decades on, we find ourselves still entangled in the ethical conundrums of living in an increasingly media-driven and technology-based society. Schermo is perhaps the most resonant work in the exhibition for both the prescience of its subject matter and its closeness to conceptual art as we understand it today.
More radically, Giuseppe Uncini’s Cementarmato (1959) moves towards the principle that material in fact no longer exists. The convention at the time of “transposing and modifying the meaning of the materials in such a way as to turn everything into painting” was too limiting for Uncini in the sense that even upon emphasising the primacy of materiality, the very nature of a painting could only ever allude to some other reality, never able to stand alone as a representation or bearing of itself. In choosing to replace the wooden stretcher with steel rods, and the white canvas with cement for Cementarmato, Uncini was able to successfully collapse that stubborn representational divide and reinstate a “self-evident unity to the work of art, derived and described by the material itself.”.Cementarmato emerges as a personal favourite in this exhibition, for the sheer singularity and tenacity of artistic imagination that Uncini managed to convey through it.
In a similar departure from painting, Ettore Colla’s Meridiana (Cerchio con sbarra e valvola) (1966) and Meridiana Quadrata (1968) reflect the use of unorthodox sculptural mediums as an assertion of both the inherent utility and beauty of natural materials. The iron assemblages appear here in stark purity- their perfect geometry bringing forth the intrinsic physicality and dynamism of their raw properties. While lacking in the political provocation characteristic of other artists of the movement, Colla was more concerned with a focused exploration of spatial forms and relationships. In a world lurched into an unpredictable period of transition, Colla’s works could be understood as being driven by the desire to yield multitudinous aspects of a disarrayed reality to exacting structures and thought processes from which stability may most typically be borne. The Meridianas exist as enduring meditations upon such a desire.
ROMA 60 may be modest in its collection, but the artworks acquired here are remarkably abundant in what they stand for. Taken as a whole, they make up a perfect introduction to the arte informale movement dominating Rome in the 1960s. Sprovieri’s gallery space opens up wonderfully for this exhibition, enabling us to encounter the artworks holistically, discovering the various idiosyncrasies and interpolations between them.
ROMA 60 is on view at Sprovieri until 24th March 2023. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Images of Rome in the 1960s have always been easy to conjure, whether in the form of Federico Fellini’s sumptuous black-and-white frames or paparazzi shots of celebrities like Brigitte Bardot traipsing along the city’s cobbled streets. The continued resonance of such images is no doubt a result of Italy’s post-war ‘Il Boom’, during which Rome in particular began to teem with an unprecedented richness and tremendousness of life. Artists, writers and filmmakers flocked to the capital, coalescing different cultural, social and political ideas in the hopes of reimagining society amidst their newfound freedom. In this way, Rome birthed a myriad of new art movements along with a whole new way of living- that of ‘la dolce vita’.
The problem, if you can call it that, with the notion of ‘la dolce vita’ is that it lends itself to being mythologised by virtue of its own fantastic nature. Retrospective awe perhaps clouding appreciation for actual, lived history.
ROMA 60 is a joy of an exhibition as it offers a compelling yet unsentimental lens into the reality of this era. As Rome stood as the epicentre of artistic experimentation in the 1960s, there were several artists who assiduously challenged the purpose and meaning of art itself. Nine of their seminal works now collectively occupy Sprovieri’s gallery space.
A lucid thread runs throughout the exhibition, with each artwork offering a key to understanding the experience of arte informale and its influence on later movements such as arte povera, pop art and avant-garde art. Arte informale refers to a type of abstraction whereby the expressive impulses of the artist are considered in favour of traditional prescriptions of form. Characterised mainly by spontaneous execution and highly gestural techniques, the intention was to extend art beyond its rigid constraints and to show that there was value to be found in the relationship between material, subject and the world at large.
This is most evident in the works of Alberto Burri, who first pushed forward the possibility of materials being ends rather than just means to the creation of art. In Burri’s Pittura (1951) on display here, the canvas is plastered with a black tar-like substance, its surface scabbed and marred by pumice stone to the point of disfiguration, giving way only to dark patches and dripping lines of enamel paint. According to Guggenheim curator Emily Braun, Burri was the “artist of wounds…attacking the supports, and surfaces, the very structure of what a canvas is…we feel these materials as if we’re feeling these textures in our own body.”. For Burri, the imposed primacy of materiality in his paintings was far from an arbitrary choice, rather one made exigent by and through his trauma as a war prisoner. By attacking his canvas, Burri was attacking not just the ‘high art’ rules of painting that he deemed no longer conducive to expressing the growing existentialist angst of the post-war period, but also the very violence, poverty and futility of war itself. Pittura was a revelation insofar as it highlighted how it was only through such primacy of materiality that Burri’s subsequent disfiguration of it was capable of invoking such visceral, innate reactions.
The contextualisation of materiality continues in Fabio Mauri’s Schermo (1958-59). Developed around a suspicion of the ubiquity of media, Mauri’s screens are presented as white and empty, allowing for infinitesimal possible projections in place of the kind of regular, scheduled programming that we may be accustomed to in our daily lives. We are privy only to what we independently project upon the screens, preventing any commonality that would make possible the interpretation of an objective reality and thereby obfuscating the lines between fact and memory, truth and fabrication. So, through Scherma, Mauri poses the central critique of the insidiousness of mass media and its tendency to corrupt our fundamental perceptions of reality. It is uncanny that six decades on, we find ourselves still entangled in the ethical conundrums of living in an increasingly media-driven and technology-based society. Schermo is perhaps the most resonant work in the exhibition for both the prescience of its subject matter and its closeness to conceptual art as we understand it today.
More radically, Giuseppe Uncini’s Cementarmato (1959) moves towards the principle that material in fact no longer exists. The convention at the time of “transposing and modifying the meaning of the materials in such a way as to turn everything into painting” was too limiting for Uncini in the sense that even upon emphasising the primacy of materiality, the very nature of a painting could only ever allude to some other reality, never able to stand alone as a representation or bearing of itself. In choosing to replace the wooden stretcher with steel rods, and the white canvas with cement for Cementarmato, Uncini was able to successfully collapse that stubborn representational divide and reinstate a “self-evident unity to the work of art, derived and described by the material itself.”.Cementarmato emerges as a personal favourite in this exhibition, for the sheer singularity and tenacity of artistic imagination that Uncini managed to convey through it.
In a similar departure from painting, Ettore Colla’s Meridiana (Cerchio con sbarra e valvola) (1966) and Meridiana Quadrata (1968) reflect the use of unorthodox sculptural mediums as an assertion of both the inherent utility and beauty of natural materials. The iron assemblages appear here in stark purity- their perfect geometry bringing forth the intrinsic physicality and dynamism of their raw properties. While lacking in the political provocation characteristic of other artists of the movement, Colla was more concerned with a focused exploration of spatial forms and relationships. In a world lurched into an unpredictable period of transition, Colla’s works could be understood as being driven by the desire to yield multitudinous aspects of a disarrayed reality to exacting structures and thought processes from which stability may most typically be borne. The Meridianas exist as enduring meditations upon such a desire.
ROMA 60 may be modest in its collection, but the artworks acquired here are remarkably abundant in what they stand for. Taken as a whole, they make up a perfect introduction to the arte informale movement dominating Rome in the 1960s. Sprovieri’s gallery space opens up wonderfully for this exhibition, enabling us to encounter the artworks holistically, discovering the various idiosyncrasies and interpolations between them.
ROMA 60 is on view at Sprovieri until 24th March 2023. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Images of Rome in the 1960s have always been easy to conjure, whether in the form of Federico Fellini’s sumptuous black-and-white frames or paparazzi shots of celebrities like Brigitte Bardot traipsing along the city’s cobbled streets. The continued resonance of such images is no doubt a result of Italy’s post-war ‘Il Boom’, during which Rome in particular began to teem with an unprecedented richness and tremendousness of life. Artists, writers and filmmakers flocked to the capital, coalescing different cultural, social and political ideas in the hopes of reimagining society amidst their newfound freedom. In this way, Rome birthed a myriad of new art movements along with a whole new way of living- that of ‘la dolce vita’.
The problem, if you can call it that, with the notion of ‘la dolce vita’ is that it lends itself to being mythologised by virtue of its own fantastic nature. Retrospective awe perhaps clouding appreciation for actual, lived history.
ROMA 60 is a joy of an exhibition as it offers a compelling yet unsentimental lens into the reality of this era. As Rome stood as the epicentre of artistic experimentation in the 1960s, there were several artists who assiduously challenged the purpose and meaning of art itself. Nine of their seminal works now collectively occupy Sprovieri’s gallery space.
A lucid thread runs throughout the exhibition, with each artwork offering a key to understanding the experience of arte informale and its influence on later movements such as arte povera, pop art and avant-garde art. Arte informale refers to a type of abstraction whereby the expressive impulses of the artist are considered in favour of traditional prescriptions of form. Characterised mainly by spontaneous execution and highly gestural techniques, the intention was to extend art beyond its rigid constraints and to show that there was value to be found in the relationship between material, subject and the world at large.
This is most evident in the works of Alberto Burri, who first pushed forward the possibility of materials being ends rather than just means to the creation of art. In Burri’s Pittura (1951) on display here, the canvas is plastered with a black tar-like substance, its surface scabbed and marred by pumice stone to the point of disfiguration, giving way only to dark patches and dripping lines of enamel paint. According to Guggenheim curator Emily Braun, Burri was the “artist of wounds…attacking the supports, and surfaces, the very structure of what a canvas is…we feel these materials as if we’re feeling these textures in our own body.”. For Burri, the imposed primacy of materiality in his paintings was far from an arbitrary choice, rather one made exigent by and through his trauma as a war prisoner. By attacking his canvas, Burri was attacking not just the ‘high art’ rules of painting that he deemed no longer conducive to expressing the growing existentialist angst of the post-war period, but also the very violence, poverty and futility of war itself. Pittura was a revelation insofar as it highlighted how it was only through such primacy of materiality that Burri’s subsequent disfiguration of it was capable of invoking such visceral, innate reactions.
The contextualisation of materiality continues in Fabio Mauri’s Schermo (1958-59). Developed around a suspicion of the ubiquity of media, Mauri’s screens are presented as white and empty, allowing for infinitesimal possible projections in place of the kind of regular, scheduled programming that we may be accustomed to in our daily lives. We are privy only to what we independently project upon the screens, preventing any commonality that would make possible the interpretation of an objective reality and thereby obfuscating the lines between fact and memory, truth and fabrication. So, through Scherma, Mauri poses the central critique of the insidiousness of mass media and its tendency to corrupt our fundamental perceptions of reality. It is uncanny that six decades on, we find ourselves still entangled in the ethical conundrums of living in an increasingly media-driven and technology-based society. Schermo is perhaps the most resonant work in the exhibition for both the prescience of its subject matter and its closeness to conceptual art as we understand it today.
More radically, Giuseppe Uncini’s Cementarmato (1959) moves towards the principle that material in fact no longer exists. The convention at the time of “transposing and modifying the meaning of the materials in such a way as to turn everything into painting” was too limiting for Uncini in the sense that even upon emphasising the primacy of materiality, the very nature of a painting could only ever allude to some other reality, never able to stand alone as a representation or bearing of itself. In choosing to replace the wooden stretcher with steel rods, and the white canvas with cement for Cementarmato, Uncini was able to successfully collapse that stubborn representational divide and reinstate a “self-evident unity to the work of art, derived and described by the material itself.”.Cementarmato emerges as a personal favourite in this exhibition, for the sheer singularity and tenacity of artistic imagination that Uncini managed to convey through it.
In a similar departure from painting, Ettore Colla’s Meridiana (Cerchio con sbarra e valvola) (1966) and Meridiana Quadrata (1968) reflect the use of unorthodox sculptural mediums as an assertion of both the inherent utility and beauty of natural materials. The iron assemblages appear here in stark purity- their perfect geometry bringing forth the intrinsic physicality and dynamism of their raw properties. While lacking in the political provocation characteristic of other artists of the movement, Colla was more concerned with a focused exploration of spatial forms and relationships. In a world lurched into an unpredictable period of transition, Colla’s works could be understood as being driven by the desire to yield multitudinous aspects of a disarrayed reality to exacting structures and thought processes from which stability may most typically be borne. The Meridianas exist as enduring meditations upon such a desire.
ROMA 60 may be modest in its collection, but the artworks acquired here are remarkably abundant in what they stand for. Taken as a whole, they make up a perfect introduction to the arte informale movement dominating Rome in the 1960s. Sprovieri’s gallery space opens up wonderfully for this exhibition, enabling us to encounter the artworks holistically, discovering the various idiosyncrasies and interpolations between them.
ROMA 60 is on view at Sprovieri until 24th March 2023. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Images of Rome in the 1960s have always been easy to conjure, whether in the form of Federico Fellini’s sumptuous black-and-white frames or paparazzi shots of celebrities like Brigitte Bardot traipsing along the city’s cobbled streets. The continued resonance of such images is no doubt a result of Italy’s post-war ‘Il Boom’, during which Rome in particular began to teem with an unprecedented richness and tremendousness of life. Artists, writers and filmmakers flocked to the capital, coalescing different cultural, social and political ideas in the hopes of reimagining society amidst their newfound freedom. In this way, Rome birthed a myriad of new art movements along with a whole new way of living- that of ‘la dolce vita’.
The problem, if you can call it that, with the notion of ‘la dolce vita’ is that it lends itself to being mythologised by virtue of its own fantastic nature. Retrospective awe perhaps clouding appreciation for actual, lived history.
ROMA 60 is a joy of an exhibition as it offers a compelling yet unsentimental lens into the reality of this era. As Rome stood as the epicentre of artistic experimentation in the 1960s, there were several artists who assiduously challenged the purpose and meaning of art itself. Nine of their seminal works now collectively occupy Sprovieri’s gallery space.
A lucid thread runs throughout the exhibition, with each artwork offering a key to understanding the experience of arte informale and its influence on later movements such as arte povera, pop art and avant-garde art. Arte informale refers to a type of abstraction whereby the expressive impulses of the artist are considered in favour of traditional prescriptions of form. Characterised mainly by spontaneous execution and highly gestural techniques, the intention was to extend art beyond its rigid constraints and to show that there was value to be found in the relationship between material, subject and the world at large.
This is most evident in the works of Alberto Burri, who first pushed forward the possibility of materials being ends rather than just means to the creation of art. In Burri’s Pittura (1951) on display here, the canvas is plastered with a black tar-like substance, its surface scabbed and marred by pumice stone to the point of disfiguration, giving way only to dark patches and dripping lines of enamel paint. According to Guggenheim curator Emily Braun, Burri was the “artist of wounds…attacking the supports, and surfaces, the very structure of what a canvas is…we feel these materials as if we’re feeling these textures in our own body.”. For Burri, the imposed primacy of materiality in his paintings was far from an arbitrary choice, rather one made exigent by and through his trauma as a war prisoner. By attacking his canvas, Burri was attacking not just the ‘high art’ rules of painting that he deemed no longer conducive to expressing the growing existentialist angst of the post-war period, but also the very violence, poverty and futility of war itself. Pittura was a revelation insofar as it highlighted how it was only through such primacy of materiality that Burri’s subsequent disfiguration of it was capable of invoking such visceral, innate reactions.
The contextualisation of materiality continues in Fabio Mauri’s Schermo (1958-59). Developed around a suspicion of the ubiquity of media, Mauri’s screens are presented as white and empty, allowing for infinitesimal possible projections in place of the kind of regular, scheduled programming that we may be accustomed to in our daily lives. We are privy only to what we independently project upon the screens, preventing any commonality that would make possible the interpretation of an objective reality and thereby obfuscating the lines between fact and memory, truth and fabrication. So, through Scherma, Mauri poses the central critique of the insidiousness of mass media and its tendency to corrupt our fundamental perceptions of reality. It is uncanny that six decades on, we find ourselves still entangled in the ethical conundrums of living in an increasingly media-driven and technology-based society. Schermo is perhaps the most resonant work in the exhibition for both the prescience of its subject matter and its closeness to conceptual art as we understand it today.
More radically, Giuseppe Uncini’s Cementarmato (1959) moves towards the principle that material in fact no longer exists. The convention at the time of “transposing and modifying the meaning of the materials in such a way as to turn everything into painting” was too limiting for Uncini in the sense that even upon emphasising the primacy of materiality, the very nature of a painting could only ever allude to some other reality, never able to stand alone as a representation or bearing of itself. In choosing to replace the wooden stretcher with steel rods, and the white canvas with cement for Cementarmato, Uncini was able to successfully collapse that stubborn representational divide and reinstate a “self-evident unity to the work of art, derived and described by the material itself.”.Cementarmato emerges as a personal favourite in this exhibition, for the sheer singularity and tenacity of artistic imagination that Uncini managed to convey through it.
In a similar departure from painting, Ettore Colla’s Meridiana (Cerchio con sbarra e valvola) (1966) and Meridiana Quadrata (1968) reflect the use of unorthodox sculptural mediums as an assertion of both the inherent utility and beauty of natural materials. The iron assemblages appear here in stark purity- their perfect geometry bringing forth the intrinsic physicality and dynamism of their raw properties. While lacking in the political provocation characteristic of other artists of the movement, Colla was more concerned with a focused exploration of spatial forms and relationships. In a world lurched into an unpredictable period of transition, Colla’s works could be understood as being driven by the desire to yield multitudinous aspects of a disarrayed reality to exacting structures and thought processes from which stability may most typically be borne. The Meridianas exist as enduring meditations upon such a desire.
ROMA 60 may be modest in its collection, but the artworks acquired here are remarkably abundant in what they stand for. Taken as a whole, they make up a perfect introduction to the arte informale movement dominating Rome in the 1960s. Sprovieri’s gallery space opens up wonderfully for this exhibition, enabling us to encounter the artworks holistically, discovering the various idiosyncrasies and interpolations between them.
ROMA 60 is on view at Sprovieri until 24th March 2023. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Images of Rome in the 1960s have always been easy to conjure, whether in the form of Federico Fellini’s sumptuous black-and-white frames or paparazzi shots of celebrities like Brigitte Bardot traipsing along the city’s cobbled streets. The continued resonance of such images is no doubt a result of Italy’s post-war ‘Il Boom’, during which Rome in particular began to teem with an unprecedented richness and tremendousness of life. Artists, writers and filmmakers flocked to the capital, coalescing different cultural, social and political ideas in the hopes of reimagining society amidst their newfound freedom. In this way, Rome birthed a myriad of new art movements along with a whole new way of living- that of ‘la dolce vita’.
The problem, if you can call it that, with the notion of ‘la dolce vita’ is that it lends itself to being mythologised by virtue of its own fantastic nature. Retrospective awe perhaps clouding appreciation for actual, lived history.
ROMA 60 is a joy of an exhibition as it offers a compelling yet unsentimental lens into the reality of this era. As Rome stood as the epicentre of artistic experimentation in the 1960s, there were several artists who assiduously challenged the purpose and meaning of art itself. Nine of their seminal works now collectively occupy Sprovieri’s gallery space.
A lucid thread runs throughout the exhibition, with each artwork offering a key to understanding the experience of arte informale and its influence on later movements such as arte povera, pop art and avant-garde art. Arte informale refers to a type of abstraction whereby the expressive impulses of the artist are considered in favour of traditional prescriptions of form. Characterised mainly by spontaneous execution and highly gestural techniques, the intention was to extend art beyond its rigid constraints and to show that there was value to be found in the relationship between material, subject and the world at large.
This is most evident in the works of Alberto Burri, who first pushed forward the possibility of materials being ends rather than just means to the creation of art. In Burri’s Pittura (1951) on display here, the canvas is plastered with a black tar-like substance, its surface scabbed and marred by pumice stone to the point of disfiguration, giving way only to dark patches and dripping lines of enamel paint. According to Guggenheim curator Emily Braun, Burri was the “artist of wounds…attacking the supports, and surfaces, the very structure of what a canvas is…we feel these materials as if we’re feeling these textures in our own body.”. For Burri, the imposed primacy of materiality in his paintings was far from an arbitrary choice, rather one made exigent by and through his trauma as a war prisoner. By attacking his canvas, Burri was attacking not just the ‘high art’ rules of painting that he deemed no longer conducive to expressing the growing existentialist angst of the post-war period, but also the very violence, poverty and futility of war itself. Pittura was a revelation insofar as it highlighted how it was only through such primacy of materiality that Burri’s subsequent disfiguration of it was capable of invoking such visceral, innate reactions.
The contextualisation of materiality continues in Fabio Mauri’s Schermo (1958-59). Developed around a suspicion of the ubiquity of media, Mauri’s screens are presented as white and empty, allowing for infinitesimal possible projections in place of the kind of regular, scheduled programming that we may be accustomed to in our daily lives. We are privy only to what we independently project upon the screens, preventing any commonality that would make possible the interpretation of an objective reality and thereby obfuscating the lines between fact and memory, truth and fabrication. So, through Scherma, Mauri poses the central critique of the insidiousness of mass media and its tendency to corrupt our fundamental perceptions of reality. It is uncanny that six decades on, we find ourselves still entangled in the ethical conundrums of living in an increasingly media-driven and technology-based society. Schermo is perhaps the most resonant work in the exhibition for both the prescience of its subject matter and its closeness to conceptual art as we understand it today.
More radically, Giuseppe Uncini’s Cementarmato (1959) moves towards the principle that material in fact no longer exists. The convention at the time of “transposing and modifying the meaning of the materials in such a way as to turn everything into painting” was too limiting for Uncini in the sense that even upon emphasising the primacy of materiality, the very nature of a painting could only ever allude to some other reality, never able to stand alone as a representation or bearing of itself. In choosing to replace the wooden stretcher with steel rods, and the white canvas with cement for Cementarmato, Uncini was able to successfully collapse that stubborn representational divide and reinstate a “self-evident unity to the work of art, derived and described by the material itself.”.Cementarmato emerges as a personal favourite in this exhibition, for the sheer singularity and tenacity of artistic imagination that Uncini managed to convey through it.
In a similar departure from painting, Ettore Colla’s Meridiana (Cerchio con sbarra e valvola) (1966) and Meridiana Quadrata (1968) reflect the use of unorthodox sculptural mediums as an assertion of both the inherent utility and beauty of natural materials. The iron assemblages appear here in stark purity- their perfect geometry bringing forth the intrinsic physicality and dynamism of their raw properties. While lacking in the political provocation characteristic of other artists of the movement, Colla was more concerned with a focused exploration of spatial forms and relationships. In a world lurched into an unpredictable period of transition, Colla’s works could be understood as being driven by the desire to yield multitudinous aspects of a disarrayed reality to exacting structures and thought processes from which stability may most typically be borne. The Meridianas exist as enduring meditations upon such a desire.
ROMA 60 may be modest in its collection, but the artworks acquired here are remarkably abundant in what they stand for. Taken as a whole, they make up a perfect introduction to the arte informale movement dominating Rome in the 1960s. Sprovieri’s gallery space opens up wonderfully for this exhibition, enabling us to encounter the artworks holistically, discovering the various idiosyncrasies and interpolations between them.
ROMA 60 is on view at Sprovieri until 24th March 2023. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Images of Rome in the 1960s have always been easy to conjure, whether in the form of Federico Fellini’s sumptuous black-and-white frames or paparazzi shots of celebrities like Brigitte Bardot traipsing along the city’s cobbled streets. The continued resonance of such images is no doubt a result of Italy’s post-war ‘Il Boom’, during which Rome in particular began to teem with an unprecedented richness and tremendousness of life. Artists, writers and filmmakers flocked to the capital, coalescing different cultural, social and political ideas in the hopes of reimagining society amidst their newfound freedom. In this way, Rome birthed a myriad of new art movements along with a whole new way of living- that of ‘la dolce vita’.
The problem, if you can call it that, with the notion of ‘la dolce vita’ is that it lends itself to being mythologised by virtue of its own fantastic nature. Retrospective awe perhaps clouding appreciation for actual, lived history.
ROMA 60 is a joy of an exhibition as it offers a compelling yet unsentimental lens into the reality of this era. As Rome stood as the epicentre of artistic experimentation in the 1960s, there were several artists who assiduously challenged the purpose and meaning of art itself. Nine of their seminal works now collectively occupy Sprovieri’s gallery space.
A lucid thread runs throughout the exhibition, with each artwork offering a key to understanding the experience of arte informale and its influence on later movements such as arte povera, pop art and avant-garde art. Arte informale refers to a type of abstraction whereby the expressive impulses of the artist are considered in favour of traditional prescriptions of form. Characterised mainly by spontaneous execution and highly gestural techniques, the intention was to extend art beyond its rigid constraints and to show that there was value to be found in the relationship between material, subject and the world at large.
This is most evident in the works of Alberto Burri, who first pushed forward the possibility of materials being ends rather than just means to the creation of art. In Burri’s Pittura (1951) on display here, the canvas is plastered with a black tar-like substance, its surface scabbed and marred by pumice stone to the point of disfiguration, giving way only to dark patches and dripping lines of enamel paint. According to Guggenheim curator Emily Braun, Burri was the “artist of wounds…attacking the supports, and surfaces, the very structure of what a canvas is…we feel these materials as if we’re feeling these textures in our own body.”. For Burri, the imposed primacy of materiality in his paintings was far from an arbitrary choice, rather one made exigent by and through his trauma as a war prisoner. By attacking his canvas, Burri was attacking not just the ‘high art’ rules of painting that he deemed no longer conducive to expressing the growing existentialist angst of the post-war period, but also the very violence, poverty and futility of war itself. Pittura was a revelation insofar as it highlighted how it was only through such primacy of materiality that Burri’s subsequent disfiguration of it was capable of invoking such visceral, innate reactions.
The contextualisation of materiality continues in Fabio Mauri’s Schermo (1958-59). Developed around a suspicion of the ubiquity of media, Mauri’s screens are presented as white and empty, allowing for infinitesimal possible projections in place of the kind of regular, scheduled programming that we may be accustomed to in our daily lives. We are privy only to what we independently project upon the screens, preventing any commonality that would make possible the interpretation of an objective reality and thereby obfuscating the lines between fact and memory, truth and fabrication. So, through Scherma, Mauri poses the central critique of the insidiousness of mass media and its tendency to corrupt our fundamental perceptions of reality. It is uncanny that six decades on, we find ourselves still entangled in the ethical conundrums of living in an increasingly media-driven and technology-based society. Schermo is perhaps the most resonant work in the exhibition for both the prescience of its subject matter and its closeness to conceptual art as we understand it today.
More radically, Giuseppe Uncini’s Cementarmato (1959) moves towards the principle that material in fact no longer exists. The convention at the time of “transposing and modifying the meaning of the materials in such a way as to turn everything into painting” was too limiting for Uncini in the sense that even upon emphasising the primacy of materiality, the very nature of a painting could only ever allude to some other reality, never able to stand alone as a representation or bearing of itself. In choosing to replace the wooden stretcher with steel rods, and the white canvas with cement for Cementarmato, Uncini was able to successfully collapse that stubborn representational divide and reinstate a “self-evident unity to the work of art, derived and described by the material itself.”.Cementarmato emerges as a personal favourite in this exhibition, for the sheer singularity and tenacity of artistic imagination that Uncini managed to convey through it.
In a similar departure from painting, Ettore Colla’s Meridiana (Cerchio con sbarra e valvola) (1966) and Meridiana Quadrata (1968) reflect the use of unorthodox sculptural mediums as an assertion of both the inherent utility and beauty of natural materials. The iron assemblages appear here in stark purity- their perfect geometry bringing forth the intrinsic physicality and dynamism of their raw properties. While lacking in the political provocation characteristic of other artists of the movement, Colla was more concerned with a focused exploration of spatial forms and relationships. In a world lurched into an unpredictable period of transition, Colla’s works could be understood as being driven by the desire to yield multitudinous aspects of a disarrayed reality to exacting structures and thought processes from which stability may most typically be borne. The Meridianas exist as enduring meditations upon such a desire.
ROMA 60 may be modest in its collection, but the artworks acquired here are remarkably abundant in what they stand for. Taken as a whole, they make up a perfect introduction to the arte informale movement dominating Rome in the 1960s. Sprovieri’s gallery space opens up wonderfully for this exhibition, enabling us to encounter the artworks holistically, discovering the various idiosyncrasies and interpolations between them.
ROMA 60 is on view at Sprovieri until 24th March 2023. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Images of Rome in the 1960s have always been easy to conjure, whether in the form of Federico Fellini’s sumptuous black-and-white frames or paparazzi shots of celebrities like Brigitte Bardot traipsing along the city’s cobbled streets. The continued resonance of such images is no doubt a result of Italy’s post-war ‘Il Boom’, during which Rome in particular began to teem with an unprecedented richness and tremendousness of life. Artists, writers and filmmakers flocked to the capital, coalescing different cultural, social and political ideas in the hopes of reimagining society amidst their newfound freedom. In this way, Rome birthed a myriad of new art movements along with a whole new way of living- that of ‘la dolce vita’.
The problem, if you can call it that, with the notion of ‘la dolce vita’ is that it lends itself to being mythologised by virtue of its own fantastic nature. Retrospective awe perhaps clouding appreciation for actual, lived history.
ROMA 60 is a joy of an exhibition as it offers a compelling yet unsentimental lens into the reality of this era. As Rome stood as the epicentre of artistic experimentation in the 1960s, there were several artists who assiduously challenged the purpose and meaning of art itself. Nine of their seminal works now collectively occupy Sprovieri’s gallery space.
A lucid thread runs throughout the exhibition, with each artwork offering a key to understanding the experience of arte informale and its influence on later movements such as arte povera, pop art and avant-garde art. Arte informale refers to a type of abstraction whereby the expressive impulses of the artist are considered in favour of traditional prescriptions of form. Characterised mainly by spontaneous execution and highly gestural techniques, the intention was to extend art beyond its rigid constraints and to show that there was value to be found in the relationship between material, subject and the world at large.
This is most evident in the works of Alberto Burri, who first pushed forward the possibility of materials being ends rather than just means to the creation of art. In Burri’s Pittura (1951) on display here, the canvas is plastered with a black tar-like substance, its surface scabbed and marred by pumice stone to the point of disfiguration, giving way only to dark patches and dripping lines of enamel paint. According to Guggenheim curator Emily Braun, Burri was the “artist of wounds…attacking the supports, and surfaces, the very structure of what a canvas is…we feel these materials as if we’re feeling these textures in our own body.”. For Burri, the imposed primacy of materiality in his paintings was far from an arbitrary choice, rather one made exigent by and through his trauma as a war prisoner. By attacking his canvas, Burri was attacking not just the ‘high art’ rules of painting that he deemed no longer conducive to expressing the growing existentialist angst of the post-war period, but also the very violence, poverty and futility of war itself. Pittura was a revelation insofar as it highlighted how it was only through such primacy of materiality that Burri’s subsequent disfiguration of it was capable of invoking such visceral, innate reactions.
The contextualisation of materiality continues in Fabio Mauri’s Schermo (1958-59). Developed around a suspicion of the ubiquity of media, Mauri’s screens are presented as white and empty, allowing for infinitesimal possible projections in place of the kind of regular, scheduled programming that we may be accustomed to in our daily lives. We are privy only to what we independently project upon the screens, preventing any commonality that would make possible the interpretation of an objective reality and thereby obfuscating the lines between fact and memory, truth and fabrication. So, through Scherma, Mauri poses the central critique of the insidiousness of mass media and its tendency to corrupt our fundamental perceptions of reality. It is uncanny that six decades on, we find ourselves still entangled in the ethical conundrums of living in an increasingly media-driven and technology-based society. Schermo is perhaps the most resonant work in the exhibition for both the prescience of its subject matter and its closeness to conceptual art as we understand it today.
More radically, Giuseppe Uncini’s Cementarmato (1959) moves towards the principle that material in fact no longer exists. The convention at the time of “transposing and modifying the meaning of the materials in such a way as to turn everything into painting” was too limiting for Uncini in the sense that even upon emphasising the primacy of materiality, the very nature of a painting could only ever allude to some other reality, never able to stand alone as a representation or bearing of itself. In choosing to replace the wooden stretcher with steel rods, and the white canvas with cement for Cementarmato, Uncini was able to successfully collapse that stubborn representational divide and reinstate a “self-evident unity to the work of art, derived and described by the material itself.”.Cementarmato emerges as a personal favourite in this exhibition, for the sheer singularity and tenacity of artistic imagination that Uncini managed to convey through it.
In a similar departure from painting, Ettore Colla’s Meridiana (Cerchio con sbarra e valvola) (1966) and Meridiana Quadrata (1968) reflect the use of unorthodox sculptural mediums as an assertion of both the inherent utility and beauty of natural materials. The iron assemblages appear here in stark purity- their perfect geometry bringing forth the intrinsic physicality and dynamism of their raw properties. While lacking in the political provocation characteristic of other artists of the movement, Colla was more concerned with a focused exploration of spatial forms and relationships. In a world lurched into an unpredictable period of transition, Colla’s works could be understood as being driven by the desire to yield multitudinous aspects of a disarrayed reality to exacting structures and thought processes from which stability may most typically be borne. The Meridianas exist as enduring meditations upon such a desire.
ROMA 60 may be modest in its collection, but the artworks acquired here are remarkably abundant in what they stand for. Taken as a whole, they make up a perfect introduction to the arte informale movement dominating Rome in the 1960s. Sprovieri’s gallery space opens up wonderfully for this exhibition, enabling us to encounter the artworks holistically, discovering the various idiosyncrasies and interpolations between them.
ROMA 60 is on view at Sprovieri until 24th March 2023. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Images of Rome in the 1960s have always been easy to conjure, whether in the form of Federico Fellini’s sumptuous black-and-white frames or paparazzi shots of celebrities like Brigitte Bardot traipsing along the city’s cobbled streets. The continued resonance of such images is no doubt a result of Italy’s post-war ‘Il Boom’, during which Rome in particular began to teem with an unprecedented richness and tremendousness of life. Artists, writers and filmmakers flocked to the capital, coalescing different cultural, social and political ideas in the hopes of reimagining society amidst their newfound freedom. In this way, Rome birthed a myriad of new art movements along with a whole new way of living- that of ‘la dolce vita’.
The problem, if you can call it that, with the notion of ‘la dolce vita’ is that it lends itself to being mythologised by virtue of its own fantastic nature. Retrospective awe perhaps clouding appreciation for actual, lived history.
ROMA 60 is a joy of an exhibition as it offers a compelling yet unsentimental lens into the reality of this era. As Rome stood as the epicentre of artistic experimentation in the 1960s, there were several artists who assiduously challenged the purpose and meaning of art itself. Nine of their seminal works now collectively occupy Sprovieri’s gallery space.
A lucid thread runs throughout the exhibition, with each artwork offering a key to understanding the experience of arte informale and its influence on later movements such as arte povera, pop art and avant-garde art. Arte informale refers to a type of abstraction whereby the expressive impulses of the artist are considered in favour of traditional prescriptions of form. Characterised mainly by spontaneous execution and highly gestural techniques, the intention was to extend art beyond its rigid constraints and to show that there was value to be found in the relationship between material, subject and the world at large.
This is most evident in the works of Alberto Burri, who first pushed forward the possibility of materials being ends rather than just means to the creation of art. In Burri’s Pittura (1951) on display here, the canvas is plastered with a black tar-like substance, its surface scabbed and marred by pumice stone to the point of disfiguration, giving way only to dark patches and dripping lines of enamel paint. According to Guggenheim curator Emily Braun, Burri was the “artist of wounds…attacking the supports, and surfaces, the very structure of what a canvas is…we feel these materials as if we’re feeling these textures in our own body.”. For Burri, the imposed primacy of materiality in his paintings was far from an arbitrary choice, rather one made exigent by and through his trauma as a war prisoner. By attacking his canvas, Burri was attacking not just the ‘high art’ rules of painting that he deemed no longer conducive to expressing the growing existentialist angst of the post-war period, but also the very violence, poverty and futility of war itself. Pittura was a revelation insofar as it highlighted how it was only through such primacy of materiality that Burri’s subsequent disfiguration of it was capable of invoking such visceral, innate reactions.
The contextualisation of materiality continues in Fabio Mauri’s Schermo (1958-59). Developed around a suspicion of the ubiquity of media, Mauri’s screens are presented as white and empty, allowing for infinitesimal possible projections in place of the kind of regular, scheduled programming that we may be accustomed to in our daily lives. We are privy only to what we independently project upon the screens, preventing any commonality that would make possible the interpretation of an objective reality and thereby obfuscating the lines between fact and memory, truth and fabrication. So, through Scherma, Mauri poses the central critique of the insidiousness of mass media and its tendency to corrupt our fundamental perceptions of reality. It is uncanny that six decades on, we find ourselves still entangled in the ethical conundrums of living in an increasingly media-driven and technology-based society. Schermo is perhaps the most resonant work in the exhibition for both the prescience of its subject matter and its closeness to conceptual art as we understand it today.
More radically, Giuseppe Uncini’s Cementarmato (1959) moves towards the principle that material in fact no longer exists. The convention at the time of “transposing and modifying the meaning of the materials in such a way as to turn everything into painting” was too limiting for Uncini in the sense that even upon emphasising the primacy of materiality, the very nature of a painting could only ever allude to some other reality, never able to stand alone as a representation or bearing of itself. In choosing to replace the wooden stretcher with steel rods, and the white canvas with cement for Cementarmato, Uncini was able to successfully collapse that stubborn representational divide and reinstate a “self-evident unity to the work of art, derived and described by the material itself.”.Cementarmato emerges as a personal favourite in this exhibition, for the sheer singularity and tenacity of artistic imagination that Uncini managed to convey through it.
In a similar departure from painting, Ettore Colla’s Meridiana (Cerchio con sbarra e valvola) (1966) and Meridiana Quadrata (1968) reflect the use of unorthodox sculptural mediums as an assertion of both the inherent utility and beauty of natural materials. The iron assemblages appear here in stark purity- their perfect geometry bringing forth the intrinsic physicality and dynamism of their raw properties. While lacking in the political provocation characteristic of other artists of the movement, Colla was more concerned with a focused exploration of spatial forms and relationships. In a world lurched into an unpredictable period of transition, Colla’s works could be understood as being driven by the desire to yield multitudinous aspects of a disarrayed reality to exacting structures and thought processes from which stability may most typically be borne. The Meridianas exist as enduring meditations upon such a desire.
ROMA 60 may be modest in its collection, but the artworks acquired here are remarkably abundant in what they stand for. Taken as a whole, they make up a perfect introduction to the arte informale movement dominating Rome in the 1960s. Sprovieri’s gallery space opens up wonderfully for this exhibition, enabling us to encounter the artworks holistically, discovering the various idiosyncrasies and interpolations between them.
ROMA 60 is on view at Sprovieri until 24th March 2023. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Images of Rome in the 1960s have always been easy to conjure, whether in the form of Federico Fellini’s sumptuous black-and-white frames or paparazzi shots of celebrities like Brigitte Bardot traipsing along the city’s cobbled streets. The continued resonance of such images is no doubt a result of Italy’s post-war ‘Il Boom’, during which Rome in particular began to teem with an unprecedented richness and tremendousness of life. Artists, writers and filmmakers flocked to the capital, coalescing different cultural, social and political ideas in the hopes of reimagining society amidst their newfound freedom. In this way, Rome birthed a myriad of new art movements along with a whole new way of living- that of ‘la dolce vita’.
The problem, if you can call it that, with the notion of ‘la dolce vita’ is that it lends itself to being mythologised by virtue of its own fantastic nature. Retrospective awe perhaps clouding appreciation for actual, lived history.
ROMA 60 is a joy of an exhibition as it offers a compelling yet unsentimental lens into the reality of this era. As Rome stood as the epicentre of artistic experimentation in the 1960s, there were several artists who assiduously challenged the purpose and meaning of art itself. Nine of their seminal works now collectively occupy Sprovieri’s gallery space.
A lucid thread runs throughout the exhibition, with each artwork offering a key to understanding the experience of arte informale and its influence on later movements such as arte povera, pop art and avant-garde art. Arte informale refers to a type of abstraction whereby the expressive impulses of the artist are considered in favour of traditional prescriptions of form. Characterised mainly by spontaneous execution and highly gestural techniques, the intention was to extend art beyond its rigid constraints and to show that there was value to be found in the relationship between material, subject and the world at large.
This is most evident in the works of Alberto Burri, who first pushed forward the possibility of materials being ends rather than just means to the creation of art. In Burri’s Pittura (1951) on display here, the canvas is plastered with a black tar-like substance, its surface scabbed and marred by pumice stone to the point of disfiguration, giving way only to dark patches and dripping lines of enamel paint. According to Guggenheim curator Emily Braun, Burri was the “artist of wounds…attacking the supports, and surfaces, the very structure of what a canvas is…we feel these materials as if we’re feeling these textures in our own body.”. For Burri, the imposed primacy of materiality in his paintings was far from an arbitrary choice, rather one made exigent by and through his trauma as a war prisoner. By attacking his canvas, Burri was attacking not just the ‘high art’ rules of painting that he deemed no longer conducive to expressing the growing existentialist angst of the post-war period, but also the very violence, poverty and futility of war itself. Pittura was a revelation insofar as it highlighted how it was only through such primacy of materiality that Burri’s subsequent disfiguration of it was capable of invoking such visceral, innate reactions.
The contextualisation of materiality continues in Fabio Mauri’s Schermo (1958-59). Developed around a suspicion of the ubiquity of media, Mauri’s screens are presented as white and empty, allowing for infinitesimal possible projections in place of the kind of regular, scheduled programming that we may be accustomed to in our daily lives. We are privy only to what we independently project upon the screens, preventing any commonality that would make possible the interpretation of an objective reality and thereby obfuscating the lines between fact and memory, truth and fabrication. So, through Scherma, Mauri poses the central critique of the insidiousness of mass media and its tendency to corrupt our fundamental perceptions of reality. It is uncanny that six decades on, we find ourselves still entangled in the ethical conundrums of living in an increasingly media-driven and technology-based society. Schermo is perhaps the most resonant work in the exhibition for both the prescience of its subject matter and its closeness to conceptual art as we understand it today.
More radically, Giuseppe Uncini’s Cementarmato (1959) moves towards the principle that material in fact no longer exists. The convention at the time of “transposing and modifying the meaning of the materials in such a way as to turn everything into painting” was too limiting for Uncini in the sense that even upon emphasising the primacy of materiality, the very nature of a painting could only ever allude to some other reality, never able to stand alone as a representation or bearing of itself. In choosing to replace the wooden stretcher with steel rods, and the white canvas with cement for Cementarmato, Uncini was able to successfully collapse that stubborn representational divide and reinstate a “self-evident unity to the work of art, derived and described by the material itself.”.Cementarmato emerges as a personal favourite in this exhibition, for the sheer singularity and tenacity of artistic imagination that Uncini managed to convey through it.
In a similar departure from painting, Ettore Colla’s Meridiana (Cerchio con sbarra e valvola) (1966) and Meridiana Quadrata (1968) reflect the use of unorthodox sculptural mediums as an assertion of both the inherent utility and beauty of natural materials. The iron assemblages appear here in stark purity- their perfect geometry bringing forth the intrinsic physicality and dynamism of their raw properties. While lacking in the political provocation characteristic of other artists of the movement, Colla was more concerned with a focused exploration of spatial forms and relationships. In a world lurched into an unpredictable period of transition, Colla’s works could be understood as being driven by the desire to yield multitudinous aspects of a disarrayed reality to exacting structures and thought processes from which stability may most typically be borne. The Meridianas exist as enduring meditations upon such a desire.
ROMA 60 may be modest in its collection, but the artworks acquired here are remarkably abundant in what they stand for. Taken as a whole, they make up a perfect introduction to the arte informale movement dominating Rome in the 1960s. Sprovieri’s gallery space opens up wonderfully for this exhibition, enabling us to encounter the artworks holistically, discovering the various idiosyncrasies and interpolations between them.
ROMA 60 is on view at Sprovieri until 24th March 2023. Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
