EMILIO ISGRÒ Art Basel Unlimited Hall 1

Transcription

1 PRESS KIT 26 th May 2016 EMILIO ISGRÒ Art Basel Unlimited Hall 1 Emilio Isgrò, Encyclopædia Britannica, 1969, (detail) Courtesy Tornabuoni Art Access: Thursday 16 th - Sunday 19 th June 2016 from 11 am until 7 pm Opening: Wednesday 15 th June 2016 from 3 pm until 8 pm From Thursday 16 th June until Sunday 19 th June 2016, the Tornabuoni Art gallery will be present for the second time at Art Basel Unlimited exhibiting a nearly 22 meter-long installation by Italian artist, Emilio Isgrò (Barcellona di Sicilia, 1937). Encyclopædia Britannica,1969, comprised of 24 encyclopedic volumes, is one of the artist s most monumental and emblematic works on which he used cancellatura, his famous erasure technique, and was commissioned by Arturo Umberto Samuele Schwarz (Alexandria, 1924), an important Post-War Italian art critic, curator and collector. «My work with erasure started in 1964, when I began using black Indian ink to strike through great classics of world literature from Dante s Divine Comedy to Shakespeare s tragedies and a variety of brochures and newspaper articles. Then, between the late Sixties and early Seventies, I went on to tackle the monuments of universal knowledge: the Enciclopedia Treccani, Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopédie Larousse, etc. My purpose was not to destroy the word but to preserve it, by interrupting the way in which it was emptied of meaning and significance through its communication by the media. Erasure calls into question the survival of the human word. As a philosophical and anthropological rather than an aesthetic problem, erasure is a brick for rebuilding the communication between peoples. We have been fed such a rich array of words that in the end we no longer read them. But if they are taken away from us for a moment, then once again we rediscover their full force and power. It is the same with images in the media: they are so many and so overwhelming as to make us effectively blind. But they need only be erased, all these acid-bright pictures, for our eye to see once again.» Emilio Isgrò, Press Contact Camille Misson Tornabuoni Art cmisson@tornabuoniart.fr The gallery is also present at Art Basel Feature Hall 2 booth C4 with a booth dedicated to American artist Salvatore Scarpitta (New York, ). For more information on the history of the gallery and its activity, please visit Follow us on Twitter (@Tornabuoniart), Facebook (@TornabuoniArt), Instagram (@TornabuoniArt) with the hashtags #ArtBasel2016 #Unlimited #TornabuoniArt #EmilioIsgrò #Cancellatura #Erasure and watch our videos on Vimeo (Tornabuoni Art). Artwork: Emilio Isgrò, Encyclopædia Britannica, 1969, plexiglas box, installation of 24 elements, cm 50 x 70 x 8.7 / (each element) 1

2 About the artist Emilio Isgrò, 2015, Photo by Paola Arpone, Emilio Isgrò was born October 1937 in the small Sicilian town of Barcellona di Sicilia. Artist, writer and pioneer in the post-war artistic language, he is known for his use of cancellatura, erasure technique in his art works. Isgrò made his literary debut in 1956 with the poetry collection Fiere del Sud (Arturo Schwarz Editore). In 1964 he began erasing encyclopaedias and other texts, making his personal contribution to the birth and development of visual poetry and conceptual art. In 1966, during a solo-show at the Galleria Traghetto in Venice, he published Dichiarazione 1, defining his conception of poetry as general art of the sign. He published the volume of poems L età della ginnastica (Mondadori). In 1977, 1978, 1986 and 1993 he participated in the Venice Biennale. He was one of a group of artists featured in the exhibition Contemporanea (1973), curated by Italian art critic, Achille Bonito Oliva (Salerne, 1939) in the underground car park of the Villa Borghese in Rome. The following year saw the publication of L avventurosa vita di Emilio Isgrò nelle testimonianze di uomini di stato, scrittori, artisti, parlamentari, attori, parenti, familiari, amici, anonimi cittadini (Il Formichiere) which was entered for the Strega Prize. In 1976 the first retrospective of his work was held at the Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione (CSAC) in Parma. In 1977 he was awarded the first prize at the XIVth Bienal de São Paulo in Brazil. That same year he also published the novel Marta de Rogatiis Johnson (Feltrinelli). In 1979 he presented at the Rotonda della Besana in Milan an installation and musical score for 15 pianos entitled Chopin. In 1982 his Gibella del Martirio and San Rocco legge la lista dei miracoli e degli orrori were performed in Gibellina. From the following year and for three consecutive seasons, his Sicilian trilogy Orestea di Gibellina was also performed in Gibellina at the Festival Internazionale delle Orestiadi. In 1985 the Scala Theatre in Milan commissioned him to create the multimedia installation La veglia di Bach for the Milanese church of San Carpoforo. In 1986 he presented the installation L ora italiana at the Civic Archaeological Museum in Bologna, commemorating the victims of the terrorist bomb attack at the city s railway station on 2 August In 1989 he published the novel Polifemo (Mondadori), at the same time working out a new theory of erasure in Teoria della cancellatura (Galleria Fonte d Abisso). Isgrò s work was featured in the exhibition The Artist and the Book in Twentieth-Century Italy, held in at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and in 1994 at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. In 1994 he also published the novel L asta delle ceneri (Camunia) and returned to poetry with the collection Oratorio dei ladri (Mondadori). In 1998 he donated 1 The Strage di Bologna (Bologna massacre) was a terrorist bombing of the Central Station at Bologna, Italy, on the morning of 2 August 1980, which killed 85 people and wounded more than 200. The attack was carried by the neo-fascist terrorist organization Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (Armed Revolutionary Nuclei). Photo: Portrait of the artist in 2015 in front of artworks on which he used his emblematic cancellatura. Photo by Paola Arpone. 2

3 2001 saw a major retrospective of his work entitled Emilio Isgrò , held in the unfinished church of Santa Maria dello Spasimo in Palermo. With Le api della Torah he began a new cycle of works featuring insects. In 2002 he published another book of poetry, Brindisi all amico infame (Aragno), which was shortlisted for the Strega Prize and won the San Pellegrino Poetry Prize. In 2007 he collected essays and writings previously published in various newspapers and magazines in a critical and theoretical companion to his creative output entitled La cancellatura e altre soluzioni (Skira). In the following year a retrospective of his work, Dichiaro di essere Emilio Isgrò, was held at the Centro per l arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato. In 2009 he exhibited at the Palazzo Stelline, Milan, and the following year in Marsala, Sicily, with Disobbedisco. Sbarco a Marsala e altre Sicilie. At the same time the exhibition Var ve yok opened at the Taksim Sanat Gallery in Istanbul, while his fourteen Codici ottomani were also on display at the Boghossian Foundation in Brussels. In May 2011 he presented the installation L Italia che dorme at the Galleria d Arte Moderna in Rome, as part of the celebrations for the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy. The same year saw the inauguration at the Bocconi University in Milan, of his Cancellazione del debito pubblico. In 2012 three of his earlier installations were reconstructed in Milan: in the Palazzo Reale, Dichiaro di non essere Emilio Isgrò (1971) and L avventurosa vita di Emilio Isgrò nelle testimonianze di uomini di stato, artisti, scrittori, parlamentari, attori, parenti, familiari, amici, anonimi cittadini (1972); in the Gallerie d Italia, L ora italiana ( ). In June 2013 he was given a retrospective entitled Modello Italia by the Galleria d Arte Moderna in Rome. In 2014 his self-portrait Dichiaro di non essere Emilio Isgrò entered the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence, while in Milan his Grande cancellatura per Giovanni Testori was installed on-site in Piazza Gino Valle, in the newly regenerated Portello district. Emilio Isgrò, Semi d arancia, 2007, his sculpture Semi d arancia (Orange Seeds) to his Sicilian birthplace, the town of Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto. In 2015 he created the Seme dell Altissimo, a marble sculpture measuring 7 metres in height which stands on the exhibition site of the Milan Expo. Letter from Arturo Schwarz to Emilio Isgrò, for the commission of the Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani, Photo 1: Emilio Isgrò, Semi d arancia (Orange seeds), 2007, fibreglass, variable dimensions Photo 2: Letter from Arturo Umberto Samuele Schwarz, art critic to Emilio Isgrò, for the commission of the Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani in

4 Photos availables for press Pages of Volume I Cristo Cancellatore, 1970 at the Luigi Pecci Contemporary Art Centre February - May 2008) Pages of Volume II Letter adressed to Emilio Isgrò from Arturo Schwarz for the commission of the Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani Pages of Volume V Semi d arancia, 2007 (Orange seeds) Fiber glass, variable dimensions Pages of Volume VII Portrait of Emilio Isgrò, 2015 Photo by Paola Arpone Pages of Volume X Grande cancellatura per Giovanni Testori, 2014 (Great erasure for Giovanni Testori), Low relief, Piazza Gino Valle, Milan, cm 247 x 2340 / in 97,2 x 921,3 Pages of Volume XVI Algebra, 2010 Acrylic on canvas, cm 70 x 100 / in 27.8 x

5 Salvatore Scarpitta, Sal Ardun Special, PRESS KIT 25 th May 2016 SALVATORE SCARPITTA Art Basel Feature Hall 2 Booth C4 Access: Thursday 16 th - Sunday 19 th June 2016 from 11 am until 7 pm Opening: Wednesday 15 th June 2016 from 3 pm until 8 pm Talk: Salvatore Scarpitta: Where action is attraction. Race cars, Saturday 18 th June 2016 at 3 pm Auditorium, Hall 1 From Thursday 16 th June until Sunday 19 th June 2016, the Tornabuoni Art gallery will be present for the second time at Art Basel. After presenting a cultural project dedicated to Paolo Scheggi in 2015, this year the gallery would like to pay tribute to an artist with wide-ranging modernist expression that included wrapped canvases, sculptures of cars and sledges, Salvatore Scarpitta (New York, ). The booth will hold museum-quality works documenting the key moments of the American artist s extraordinary career and in particular his research on race cars. Amongst the artworks exhibited: Sal Ardun Special, , built and raced by the artist and Racing Car 21, , both leave the world of art galleries to expand their field of action, preparing the visitor for a large 1996 installation entitled Sling Shot (Kenny Adam s Eve), a spiritual testament of the artist and summa of his experiences. The show will be accompanied by an exhibition catalogue, a project in collaboration with i-am Foundation, Milan, including never before published photos and texts by Luigi Sansone author of the Salvatore Scarpitta Catalogue Raisonné. What else? A talk entitled Salvatore Scarpitta: Where action is attraction. Race cars will take place on Saturday 18 th June at 3 pm in the Auditorium in Hall 1. A conversation between Luigi Sansone (author of Salvatore Scarpitta s Catalogue Raisonné), James Harithas (director of the Station Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston, Texas and expert of Salvatore Scarpitta s works with cars) and Not Vital (artist and friend of Salvatore Scarpitta) will be moderated by Mirta d Argenzio (art historian). During the talk an interview on video of Lisa Melandri (director of the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri) curated by Valentina Fasan of the i-am Foundation will be shown. Press Contact Camille Misson Tornabuoni Art cmisson@tornabuoniart.fr The gallery is also present at Art Basel Unlimited Hall 1 with a booth dedicated to Italian artist Emilio Isgrò (Barcellona di Sicilia, 1937). For more information on the history of the gallery and its activity, please visit Follow us on Twitter (@Tornabuoniart), Facebook (@TornabuoniArt), Instagram (@TornabuoniArt) with the hashtags #ArtBasel2016 #Feature #TornabuoniArt #SalvatoreScarpitta #RaceCars #RacingCars and watch our videos on Vimeo (Tornabuoni Art). Artwork: Salvatore Scarpitta, Sal Ardun Special, , racing car with engine Ford, cm 125 x 352 x 185 / in 49.2 x x

6 About the artist Salvatore Scarpitta in his studio at 333 Park Av. Street, New York, working at Hal Speciale or Rajo Jack, 1964 Photo by Hans Namuth. Salvatore Scarpitta was born in 1919 in Manhattan, New York to a Russian-born actress and a Sicilian-born sculptor. He was raised in Los Angeles, California after his father was commissioned to do the bas-relief sculptures on the Los Angeles Stock Exchange Building. After completing his high-school education in Hollywood, Scarpitta left the United States to live in Sicily then Rome from 1936 to 1958 where he attended and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and was a member of the «Monuments Men 1». After the war, he remained in Italy until 1958, year he became well acquainted with New York gallery owner Leo Castelli who promised Scarpitta gallery representation if he returned to New York. December 1958, Scarpitta headed back to New York, and in January 1959 the Leo Castelli Gallery held his first solo exhibition in the United States entitled «Salvatore Scarpitta - Extramurals», which featured wrapped and bandaged canvases made of torn up strips of canvas glued to frames. These bendati had been exhibited at the La Tartaruga Gallery in Rome the previous year in 1958 and were the first relief paintings seen in America. The wrapped paintings were «inventions that had no reference points elsewhere» (Claudio Cerritelli, Italian art critic). From 1959 to 1992, the Leo Castelli Gallery dedicated ten solo-shows to Scarpitta in addition to multiple group shows. He became a well-known member of the avant-garde art scene in New York, well thought of by Abstract-Expressionist artists including de Kooning, Rothko and Kline, and their supportive art critic, Harold Rosenberg. In 1959, Scarpitta s first works with a structure appeared, starting in the form of an X. In 1964, Scarpitta started introducing in his paintings, objects from the world of cars and race tracks such as seatbelts, harness buckles, exhaust pipes, etc, gluing them onto his canvases. Scarpitta had a true fascination and love for automobiles, espacially race cars. This interest for races and vehicles stemmed 1 The Monuments Men were a courageous group of 350 men and women from thirteen nations who volunteered for service in the newly created Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section (MFAA) during World War II. Most had expertise as museum directors, curators, art scholars and educators, artists, architects, and archivists. Their job description was simple: to protect, safeguard and save as much of civilization s most important artistic and cultural treasures, and most specifically the culture of Europe from armed conflict and destruction at the hands of Nazi fanatics. ( 2

7 from growing up in the Californian automobile culture. In the 1930s in Los Angeles, he had become a frequent spectator of the Legion Ascot Speedway races, meeting drivers and mechanics, watching races and prize ceremonies and sometimes witnessing tragic accidents. «When I was a kid, I hung around garages in California and I was in ecstasy. I loved the smells, the noises, every little detail of that world. (...) I admired the racing drivers and the races at the time. The first time I ever painted, it was the numbers driver-friends let me put on their shiny multicoloured vehicles. (Afterwards) I started to paint their portraits..» (Salvatore Scarpitta in an interview with Barbara Snyder in a 1986 issue of A Journal for artists). These experiences and memories created on the racetracks would become of fundamental importance in the artist s life and great influence - if not the backbone - in his art. With the same sensitivity as Arte Povera artists, he utilized found objects in his art, adding and working with car and machine parts in his sculptures. He also used skis and sledges to express movement as «a metaphor of existence». (Kathryn Shattuck, journalist) In 1964, after overhearing a visitor describing his work as tragic during a show at the Leo Castelli Gallery, a touched Salvatore started making automobiles, «because it seemed like going directly to the source of what contained my paintings. Instead of putting the exhaust pipe on a painting, I put it back where it was before (...).» Salvatore Scarpitta with his cars Rajo Jack and Hal Special. One of his first car replicas Rajo Jack Special, 1964 was the reproduction of the car driven by the first African American race-car driver in the United Sates of America, Rajo Jack. Scarpitta s research and work on cars culminated with two exhibitions held at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1965 and the Leo Castelli Warehouse in Not only did Scarpitta create sculpted versions of vehicles, but he also raced them on dirt tracks near his home in New Oxford, Pennsylvania. In the summer of 1985, Scarpitta finished working on a functioning dirt track racer named Sal Scarpitta Special, that he later drove against true racers. In 1985 he decided to put together his own team and to compete in real races. The name of his crew sponsor, the Leo Castelli Gallery, was painted on the side of his race-car. In the 1970s, inspired from his childhood memories (unlike the racing cars, inspired by his teenage years), Scarpitta directed his research and work to sledges, built out of found objects such as chairs, hockey sticks and Christmas trees, also wrapped with his signature bendati. From 1965 to 2001, Scarpitta taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. He died on April 10, 2007 at his home in Manhattan. Salvatore Scarpitta with his cars on a racetrack in Pennsylvania. Photo 1: Salvatore Scarpitta with his cars Rajo Jack and Hal Special at the exhibition Salvatore Scarpitta - Racing Cars, at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, Photo by Rudolph Burckhard. Photo 2: Salvatore Scarpitta with some of his racing cars on the track, from left to right: Trevis, Autograph and last on the right Sal Ardun Special, Pennsylvania, The artist s works have been exhibited at major institutions throughout the world including four Venice Biennales, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. His work is represented in many collections such as the Castello di Rivoli Museo d Arte Contemporanea in Torino. A Catalogue Raisonné of Salvatore Scarpitta s work, edited by Luigi Sansone, was published by Mazzotta, in 3

8 Photos available for press Racing Car 21, Painted wood, cm 158 x 307 / in 62.2 x Salvatore Scarpitta working on Hal Special at one of his exhibitions at the Leo Castelli Warehouse, New York, Miller Shell, 1968 Car element, cm 61 x 35 / in 24 x 13.8 Salvatore Scarpitta with his cars Rajo Jack and Hal Special at the Salvatore Scarpitta - Racing Cars exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, Photo by Rudolph Burckhard, Coda d auto, Car element, cm 69 x 47 x 96 / in 27.2 x 18.5 x 37.8 Salvatore Scarpitta in his New York studio at 333 Park Avenue Street, working on some of his cars, Photo by Robert Ross, Courtesy Archivio Salvatore Scarpitta under the direction of Luigi Sansone, Sling Shot (Kenny Adam s Eve), 1996 Mixed media, cm 305 x 215 x 150 / in x 84.6 x 59.1 Salvatore Scarpitta in his New York studio at 333 Park Avenue Street working on Rajo Jack or Hal Special, Photo by Hans Namuth, Courtesy Archivio Salvatore Scarpitta under the direction of Luigi Sansone, Sal Ardun Special, Racing car with engine Ford (8 engine block), cm 125 x 352 x 185 / in 49.2 x x 72.8 Salvatore Scarpitta with some of his racing cars on the track : Trevis, Autograh and Sal Ardun (from left to right), Pennsylvania, Salvatore Scarpitta in his studio, Kenny Adams, driver of Scarpitta s sprint cars, on the track at Lincoln Speedway, Sal Ardun Special, installation at the exhibition «Culture and the Automobile» Institute of the Arts, Detroit, Salvatore Scarpitta working on the car Sal Cragar in his studio,

9 About the gallery Installation view of the Alighiero Boetti solo-show held March until June 2010 in Paris Courtesy Tornabuoni Art Tornabuoni Arte was founded in Florence in 1981 by Roberto Casamonti and is specialized in Italian art of the second half of the 20 th Century. It established exhibition spaces in Milan in 1995, Forte Dei Marmi in 2004, Paris in October 2009 and London in Tornabuoni Art in Paris presents the work of Fontana, Castellani, Manzoni, Dorazio, Bonalumi, Dadamaino and Boetti together with the major protagonists of the Italian Novecento such as De Chirico, Morandi, Balla, Severeni and Sironi. The gallery also proposes works of essential artists of the 20th entury such as Picasso, ir, andinsky, artung, Poliako, ubu et, am, Matta, Christo, Wesselmann, Warhol and Basquiat. Since inaugurating its Parisian space in 2009 with an exhibition dedicated to Lucio Fontana, Tornabuoni Art has organized numerous monographic exhibitions, always in close consultation with the artists or the foundations that represent them. The gallery has shown the works of Alighiero Boetti (2010), Arnaldo Pomodoro (2011), Enrico Castellani (2011), Mimmo Rotella (2012), Giuseppe Capogrossi (2013), Dadamaino (2013), an exceptional exhibition «Lucio Fontana, rediscovery of a masterpiece» in parallel with the retrospective at the Musée d Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the first retrospective in rance of Turi Simeti (2014), a retrospective of Alberto Biasi (2015), a solo-show dedicated to Giuseppe Chiari (2015) and retrospectives of Paolo Scheggi (2015) and Piero Dorazio (2016). Besides these solo shows, the gallery also presents group shows such as «The Monochrome Under Pressure» (2012), «Bianco Italia» (2013), «Between Sign and Writing: a path through Italian art» (2014), «Ceci n est pas une idée» (2015) or oma Pop 2016 brought together by di erent curators who are given carte blanche, each show o ering a uni ue approach to the gallery s collection. The gallery has added a touch of contemporary art to the family tradition, in particular with the artists Francesca Pasquali and Mikayel Ohanjanyan. Gallery Contact Francesca Piccolboni Director fpiccolboni@tornabuoniart.fr Press Contact Camille Misson Tornabuoni Art cmisson@tornabuoniart.fr 5