9 April – 29 May 2022

THE GENETICS OF FORM Antonio Barbieri, Giulio Bensasson, Roberto Ghezzi, Giulia Manfredi, Miriam Montani, Bernardo Tirabosco, Medina Zabo, curatorship Davide Silvioli

9 April – 29 May 2022 Museum of Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto

VASCO BENDINI: Volti e diluvi. Works from the collection of Palazzo Collicola, curated by Lorenzo Fiorucci

9 April – 29 May 2022 Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto

THE GENETICS OF FORM

In the seasonal programme of Palazzo Collicola, the group exhibition The Genetics of Form is a moment of attention on how contemporary artistic practices are reformulating the entity of form in the work of art, starting from the analysis of the work of a selection of emerging and mid-career artists. The project, curated by Davide Silvioli, brings to the exhibition a group of seven artists with different lexicons and references, unified by the use of methodologies that experiment with means, processes, matter and materials, at times innovative and at times traditional, sometimes hybridizing them, to create new aesthetic destinations, where form, insubordinable to the canonical prescriptions of eurythmy and composition, opens up to the unstable effect of operations that alter and undermine any claim to completeness or completion.

The title of the exhibition, on this basis, is inspired by the anecdote that scientists James Watson and Francis Crick, in discovering the double helix morphology of the DNA structure, were apparently inspired by some scribbles Crick made in his workbook. Despite its apparent simplicity, this episode tells us much about the nature of form in the molecular universe as well as in that of artistic research, encapsulating the complexity of the relationship between form and substance, between form and external environment, between natural form and artificial form, between form and appearance, between form and its perception. Therefore, the languages of Antonio Barbieri, Giulio Bensasson, Roberto Ghezzi, Giulia Manfredi, Miriam Montani, Bernardo Tirabosco, Medina Zabo, with a high degree of interdisciplinarity, represent seven researches that, while evaluating their respective subjectivities, adequately and unanimously argue the theoretical premises of the exhibition. Scattered through the rooms on the ground floor of the museum, their works, ranging from sculpture to installation and video, and eluding easy nomenclature, provide a concise but exhaustive scenario of how the classical category of form, interpreted in the project as the result of the simultaneous effect – not always disciplined – of endogenous and exogenous impulses, is still being revised by the contemporary world.

Antonio Barbieri (Rho, 1985). His research aims to analyse the changes in life forms, the way they structure and modify themselves over time. His continuous stylistic experimentation leads him to a significant use of technology, which acts as a humus for the conception of his works. The resulting subjects range from the representation of hypothetical organisms to the study of fractal rules applied to nature. He has exhibited at the Fondazione Tomassini in Orvieto, the Officine Chigiotti in Grosseto and the Contemporary Cluster in Rome.
Giulio Bensasson (Rome, 1990). He obtained a diploma in Painting and a specialist diploma in Sculpture and New Technologies applied to space at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. His practice is mainly developed through sculpture and installation. Time is a primary element in many of his works, an expressive material through which he investigates the transformation of matter. He is a studio assistant to the artist Alfredo Pirri. He has exhibited at the Fondazione Pastificio Cerere in Rome, at the Jacobs Museum in Zurich, at the Ravnikar Gallery in Ljubljana.
Roberto Ghezzi (Cortona, 1978). His training began in his family’s studio and continued at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. His beginnings in the 1990s were linked to painting. Over time, he developed a conceptual design that found expression in a body of unpublished works: the Naturografie©, works created “through” nature, in a dialogue where Man and the Environment are connected. He has held exhibitions, residencies, environmental installations and projects in Italy and in places such as Alaska, Iceland, South Africa and Patagonia.

Giulia Manfredi (Castelfranco Emilia, 1984) lives and works in Rome. She graduated in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. In Berlin, where she worked and had a studio for eight years, she attended courses with Hito Steyrl at the UDK University of Arts. In 2017, she won the Cramum Prize. She works on the theme of the co-presence of life and death, translated, in her works, through the antithesis between living and defenceless materials. She has exhibited at the AMT Project in Bratislava, the Biennal of Young Artists in Nottingham and the Mediterranean Biennial. Miriam Montani (Cascia, 1986) lives and works between Umbria and Milan, where she founded the Carrozzeria delle Rose space in 2021. She trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. She founded the cultural project Sciameproject. Between 2015 and 2020 she took part in Progetto Borca, Dolomiti Contemporanee. Between 2019 and 2020 she was in residence at Viafarini, in Milan. In 2021 one of her artistic contributions was featured in the Italian Pavilion of the 17th International Architecture Biennale in Venice “Resilient Communities”.
Bernardo Tirabosco (Arezzo, 1991) obtained his master’s degree in visual arts, specializing in painting, from the Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia. He lives and works in Arezzo, where in 2019 he opened his own workshop: Sottofondostudio, a space that has evolved and expanded into an independent exhibition reality in the city centre. He is the studio assistant of artist Giulia Cenci. He has exhibited at the Orto Botanico in Lucca, the Kunsthaus in Oberberg, the Officine Brandimarte in Ascoli Piceno and the Museo Capitolare Diocesano in Foligno.

Medina Zabo (Arezzo, 1979). She trained at the University of Perugia, the IED in Rome and the Fine Arts Academies of Perugia and Rome. Since 2020 she has lived and worked between Etruria and the East End of London. Her artistic investigation moves along the themes of colonisation and metamorphosis, through a reversal of the metaphor of the beehive, both conceptually and in the use of materials of animal and industrial origin. He has exhibited at the Galerie Kub in Leipzig, the Colorado Photographic Art Center in Denver and the Centro Di Sarro in Rome.

VASCO BENDINI: Volti e diluvi. Works from the collection of Palazzo Collicola is a solo exhibition for the 100th anniversary of the birth of an artist who has marked the destiny of much of the development of Italian painting from the post-war period to the early 2000s. Although Vasco Bendini (Bologna 1922 – Rome 2015) was originally from Emilia and lived in Rome for many years, he was particularly close to Spoleto thanks to his friendship with Bruno Toscano, which had developed since the days of the Spoleto Prize, which he won on two occasions (1955 and 1957), and which continued to be cultivated over time until the donation of a substantial nucleus of works, almost all from the 1950s, desired by Vasco and made by Marcella Valentini Bendini, to enrich the Spoleto gallery in 1989. It was therefore an important relationship with the city and its museum, that today intend to pay tribute to him by rediscovering that group of donated works, including the only surviving example of the Diluvi cycle. In the exhibition curated by Lorenzo Fiorucci, the works alternate with documents and critical analyses, in particular by Francesco Arcangeli, Bendini’s first supporter as well as an influential critic of the Spoleto group. In fact, it was through the theorisation of the last naturalism that the debate opened in Italy, as early as 1954, around a young generation of artists (in particular Emiliani and Lombardi, but also the Spoletini), in which Vasco Bendini was, together with Mattia Moreni, Ennio Morlotti and others, among the protagonists of this critical event that opened up a new, existential vision of art. Bendini, who around 1950 “struggled with Masaccio”, as Arcangeli recalls, immediately afterwards “began to fill large pastel papers with storms and deluge: whirlwinds that we can barely remember, agitated coils, blacks that avalanche on themselves. Nothing remains of them: and yet the abandonment to that very isolated and almost absurd anarchy was […] of an absolute frankness”. As we have said, the only remaining evidence of the Diluvi is in Spoleto, but alongside this are canvases and papers of intense spiritual afflatus, mistaken at the time for eternal abstraction; looking at them today, they disclose intense and delicate shadows of subtle faces, oscillating between the memory of the image and an almost subconscious vision, generated by small strokes.

It is the grammar of informal tachisme that emerges and returns these images with intense emotion. These are the years, from the beginning of the 1950s to the beginning of the 1960s, with an appendix on the 1980s, when the artist returned to reinterpret some of the initial themes of his rich artistic career, that interest the Spoleto exhibition, which is accompanied by the publication of the catalogue, offered by the Freemocco publisher of Deruta; among other contributions, it includes an interview by Bruno Toscano. Vasco Bendini (Bologna 27 February 1922 – Rome 31 January 2015) A pupil of Virgilio Guidi and Giorgio Morandi, he attended their courses at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, but his first exhibition was held in Lombardy, in Milan at the Bergamini Gallery in 1949. Over the following decade he exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions, in particular in Florence in 1953 at the Galleria La Torre presented by Francesco Arcangeli who shortly afterwards included him in the group of the Last Naturalists theorised in the pages of the magazine “Paragone” (1954). In 1956 he took part in the Venice Biennale in 1959 and was invited to the Rome Quadrenniale, while in 1961 he was in Brazil at the São Paulo Biennale and in 1962 at the Tokyo Biennale, and then again in Venice in 1964. His painting was influenced by Informalism, in the Archangelian declination of nature tinged with an inclination towards abstraction. The turning point came in 1966 when, presented by Giulio Carlo Argan at the L’Attico gallery in Rome, a certain formal inflection appeared in his painting that would be typical of arte povera. This trend was also confirmed a year later, when he presented his canvases at the Studio Bentivoglio in Bologna, with an essay by Arcangeli. The 1970s opened with his third participation in the Venice Biennale in 1972, invited by Renato Barilli. In 1973 he moved to the capital, where he returned to live in 2012 after an interval of working in Parma. These are the years in which he inaugurated important personal and anthological exhibitions in Italy and abroad, including the C.S.A.C. in Parma, the Italian Cultural Institute in Cologne, the Saarbruecken Museum of Modern Art and the Saarlouis Museum of Modern Art, the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna in Bologna, the Franco Antonicelli Cultural Union in Turin, the Casa del Mantegna in Mantua, the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna in Spoleto, the P.A.C. in Milan, the Pinacoteca in Ravenna, the Galleria Civica in Modena, Palazzo Forti in Verona, the Galleria Civica d’arte contemporanea in Trento, the Loggetta Lombardesca, the Museo della Città in Ravenna, the Palazzo Comunale in Salò, the Museo Laboratorio d’Arte Contemporanea of the University La Sapienza in Rome, the Teatro Farnese in Parma, the Palazzo Sarcinelli in Conegliano, the Civica Galleria in Lissone, the Museo Bocchi in Parma, the Castello Masnago in Varese, the MACRO in Rome, the Museo Palazzo de’ Mayo in Chieti. During his stay in Parma, he received numerous awards for his career, including the 2002 Lissone Prize, the Marina di Ravenna Prize, the Guglielmo Marconi Prize, the G.B. Salvi Prize in Sassoferrato (Ancona), the Targa Ricordo Volponi in Bologna, and the tribute exhibition at the MACRO in Rome. In 2009, under the presidency of Marcella Valentini Bendini, the Archive of Vasco Bendini’s work was set up in Parma and later transferred to Rome. Vice President Irene Santori. Finally, in 2012 the last monograph of the artist was presented at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome.