PRESS RELEASE

EXHIBITION: " FUOCHI " METAMORFOSI DELLA TERRA.
LA CERAMICA IN ITALIA VERSO L'INFORMALE E DOPO " Da De Chirico e Arturo Martini a Lucio Fontana, Fausto Melotti e Leonardo Leoncillo. Da Nanni Valentini e Giuseppe Spagnulo a Giacinto Cerone ed Enzo Castagno, Da Sebastian Matta ed Asger Jorn a Kenneth Noland e Max Bill.

ARTISTS: De Chirico, Marino Marini, Arturo Martini, Lucio Fontana, Fausto Melotti, Roberto Crippa, Asger Jorn, Wilfredo Lam, Antonio Corpora, Sebastian Matta, Eduardo Arroyo, Giuseppe Santomaso, Max Bill, Piero Dorazio, Kenneth Noland, Giuseppe Maraniello, Nanni Valentini, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Giuseppe Spagnulo, Giacinto Cerone, Enzo Castagno

LOCATION: GROSSETTI ARTE CONTEMPORANEA
Via Paolo Sarpi, 44 20154 Milano Tel. +39 02 29 06 21 28 Fax.+39 02 29 01 47 67
E-mail: grossettiart@tiscalinet.it

DURATION: 19th November 2003 - 14th January 2004 Tuesday-Friday 10,30 am -19,30 pm Saturday: on appointment OPENING: Wednesday, November 19th 2003 from 18,30 onwards

FUOCHI - METAMORFOSI DELLA TERRA.
LA CERAMICA IN ITALIA VERSO L'INFORMALE E DOPO
comprises the works of more than twenty Italian and international artists who have considerably shaped the experience of ceramics in Italy in the 20th century. Departing with momentous works by early masters such as De Chirico, Marino Marini and Arturo Martini the exhibition's focus lies on the evolution of ceramics as an autonomous artistic medium through the exploration of the material's properties and limits in the search for sculptural expression and new artistic languages.

The liberation of ceramics from its historical and traditional association with handicrafts has seen its definite turning point in the 1930s and 40s with abstract sculptural works by artists such as Lucio Fontana, Leonardo Leoncillo and Fausto Melotti, significantly paving the way for the advent of new post-war linguistic experiments with terracotta and ceramics. This transition is no more clear than in the exposed works by Fontana spanning the period from the early 1930s with the painted terracotta sculpture Studio di testa over his baroque phase represented by a Battaglia to his concetti spaziali of the 1950s and early 1960s. The vibrant international atmosphere in 1950s and 60s Albisola, hothouse of informale experiences within the ceramic genre, unites the works by as different protagonists such as COBRA artist Asger Jorn with those by Fontana, Roberto Crippa, Wilfredo Lam, Antonio Corpora, Sebastian Matta and Piero Dorazio. Widely divergent and highly individual, the works are connected by the artists' search for autonomous values within the ceramic medium: for many of them an often sporadic experience that has found itıs continuation also in later works by the Spaniard Eduardo Arrojo, Giuseppe Santomaso, Kenneth Noland, Max Bill, and Giuseppe Maraniello.

The exhibition's focus on the exploration of the material's properties and limits in the search for sculptural expression and new artistic languages comes full circle with the last five artists shown: Nanni Valentini, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Giuseppe Spagnulo, Giacinto Cerone and Enzo Castagno. The raw poetry of Nanni Valentini's grès sculptures of the early 1980s bridges the relationship between tradition, myth and contemporaneity reflecting his discourse with Arturo Martini. His works are flanked by no less than five sculptures by Giuseppe Spagnulo, spanning the past forty years of his experiences with grès and terracotta, including a large Guerriero from the 1980s and a Ritratto from 2003, and recent works by Arnaldo Pomodoro. A monumental sculpture by Enzo Castagno from the late 1980s when the artist was only in his mid-twenties, pays testimony to his then close relationship to Valentini and Spagnulo: juxtaposition of poetry and brut force that evaporates from within broken earth. In contrast to the early work of the artist, the exhibition shows another large wall sculpture by Castagno, Senza Titolo from 2002, a clear-cut, suspended grid structure that, embodying an imprint of itself, plays on the relationship between symbols and science, yet remains enigmatic, leaving the mind itself in a state of suspension. Also the three works by Giacinto Cerone generate some uneasiness. His sculptures are testimony to the artist's unique exploration of an immediate and fictional reality through an underlying harsh symbolic, yet romantic language and to his obvious sentimental, yet uncompromising violation of the material.

Fuochi!
The fire's force in the kiln is the departing point for earth's metamorphosis from something so humble, yet elementary to our existence into these artists' visual embodiment of being. Existence through the exploration of earth's material which might be subservient or violent to the substance itself in order to co-exist within an immediate and fictional environment through finding new languages that bridge the relationship between history, tradition and myth, symbols and modern science, contemporaneity and future.



Lisa Hockemeyer - London