A precise moment
The exhibition examines the precise moment in which the artists’ work is characterised by taking on new languages ranging from dance to the event, from happening to theatre, from painting to music, from theory to sculpture, from cinema to video.
Corpo a corpo | Body To Body (catalogo)La Galleria Nazionale
Within these complex cultural events, the exhibition aims to only carve the area where the artist, leaving traditional art forms behind, uses the body as an expressive medium.
Corpo a corpo | Body To Body (catalogo)La Galleria Nazionale
A crucial moment that spans the two decades of the 60s and 70s, years of awareness-raising and self-determination marked by the experimental research that variously represented the feminist issues of artists such as Marina Abramović, Tomaso Binga, Sanja Iveković, Ketty la Rocca, Gina Pane, Suzanne Santoro and Francesca Woodman and pioneers in dance like Trisha Brown, Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer in Claudio Abate's shots.
Corpo a corpo | Body To Body (catalogo)La Galleria Nazionale
In recent years, body language has been recaptured by the latest generation of Italian artists such as the couple formed by Eleonora Chiari and Sara Goldschmied, Chiara Fumai, Silvia Giambrone, Valentina Miorandi and Alice Schivardi - and the Paris-based art collective Claire Fontaine.
All of them have modernised the legacy received by their predecessors, creating a series of works that permeate through the reasons of aesthetics and those of politics.
Corpo a corpo | Body To Body (catalogo)La Galleria Nazionale
Their work brings the features that American critic Lucy Lippard recognised as the contribution of feminism in the artistic history of the 70s back to life: an art “simultaneously aesthetically and socially effective” characterised “by an element of dissemination and by a need for connection beyond the process and the product”.
Corpo a corpo | Body To Body (catalogo)La Galleria Nazionale
Even today, photography, gesture and performance-related action are the ideal instruments used in the early 1960s by artists to continuously deconstruct classical language and the means of expression and bring their failings to light.
Corpo a corpo | Body To Body (catalogo)La Galleria Nazionale
In fact, verbal language has often proved insufficient in defining complex moods. Therefore its visual deconstruction, through collage and video, is still crucial for expressing feelings and points of view that are difficult to analyse with other means of expression.
Curated by Paola Ugolini
Artists in the exhibit: Claudio Abate, Marina Abramović and Ulay, Renate Bertlmann, Tomaso Binga, Claire Fontaine, Chiara Fumai, Silvia Giambrone, Goldschmied & Chiari, Sanja Iveković, Ketty La Rocca, Valentina Miorandi, Gina Pane, Suzanne Santoro, Alice Schivardi, Francesca Woodman.
