GTHE GENETICS OF FORM
Antonio Barbieri, Giulio Bensasson, Roberto Ghezzi, Giulia Manfredi, Miriam Montani, Bernardo Tirabosco, Medina Zabo
curated by Davide Silvioli
Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto 9 aprile – 29 maggio 2022

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.