Show Case: Exhibiting the Archive
Group exhibition
In conjunction with the opening of the 2021 Fotografia Europea festival (inspired by Gianni Rodari’s poetic invitation: “On the Moon and on Earth / Make way for Dreamers!”) and as a follow-up to the 2019 exhibition Rehang: Archives, Collezione Maramotti offers a new take on its permanent exhibition, through a selection of documents and materials from its library and archive.
Stretching through the galleries that permanently house over two hundred works from the 1950s to the present, a series of temporary vitrines will showcase photos, papers, drawings, artists’ books, and ephemera from some of the artists on view, to provide broader context for their work and fresh perspective on the exhibition.
The material related to Alighiero Boetti, Eliseo Mattiacci, Mario Schifano, Pino Pascali, Jannis Kounellis, Sergio Lombardo and Cesare Tacchi, on the first floor, shows the vibrant artistic ferment of the 1960s and ‘70s in Italy. On the second floor, the energy and creativity of the New York painting scene in the ’80s and ’90s is described through documentation about the work of Eric Fischl, Julian Schnabel and Ellen Gallagher. This material rounds out the digital content that has been added to the rooms via QR codes since 2020, to offer new insights on the collection.
Alighiero Boetti
Insicuro Noncurante is a large book published in 1975 in an edition of just 41 signed, numbered copies. This precious portfolio of 81 plates, collected by Boetti himself, touches on many themes key to the artist’s vision. We are presenting several of these plates, including “Scrivere con la sinistra è disegnare” (Writing with your left hand is drawing), which directly relates to the work Gary Gilmore (1977) on view in the collection.
Eliseo Mattiacci
The original sketch for Trucioli e calamita (1968-’69) and several photos of other works by Mattiacci, presented alongside it at Galleria dell’Oca in 2004, show the artist’s idea of space as a web of energy fields.
Mario Schifano
An X-ray of the surface of Manifesto 1960 (1960) shows the process through which the work was created: Schifano’s monochrome “screens” are not about stripping painting down so much as building it up, through suspended layers of communication.
Pino Pascali, Jannis Kounellis, Sergio Lombardo, Cesare Tacchi
A series of photos from Plinio De Martiis’s gallery La Tartaruga, one of the busiest hubs of the Italian art scene in the 1960s, reflects the cultural ferment of the time, when Rome was a meeting ground for artists, writers, critics and intellectuals.
Eric Fischl
Fischl’s two large paintings Birthday Boy (1983) and The Philosopher’s Chair (1999) exemplify the voyeuristic, psychological gaze of this American artist, whose characters inhabit ambiguous, liminal spaces.
Ephemera, articles and correspondence between the artist and Mario Diacono, who was showing them in his gallery at the time, offer a glimpse into their “genealogy of form” and symbolic references.
Julian Schnabel
Photos taken in Schnabel’s Long Island studio in the 1980s capture several concrete stages in the creation of his famous “plate paintings” (two of which are exhibited in the collection), showing the New York artist’s ongoing penchant for technical experimentation.
Ellen Gallagher
Ephemera, books, photos, and the artist’s own words, especially from a dialogue with Peter Halley published in 1997, reveal the impulses underlying Gallagher’s practice, which is deeply concerned with questions of race and the assimilation of Black people in American culture and society.
