Johan & Levi: Illustrati

In a career of just twelve years, the Belgian Marcel Broodthaers (Brussels, 1924 – Cologne, 1976) produced more ideas than most artists do in an entire lifetime. After devoting himself to poetry for twenty years, he abandoned it in 1964 to enter into a pact with a universe of very different values, namely the visual arts. Traversing media freely – from installation and sculpture to artist’s books, prints, film and inscriptions on aluminium panels – Broodthaers embodied the “post-media artist” for whom any form could be used in the service of an idea. The conceptions that drove his work included institutional critique (of which he was a pioneer), the debunking of art and visual puzzles. Edited by the artist’s daughter Marie-Puck Broodthaers, the book includes a vast selection of previously unpublished photographs, two important art-critical studies, a complete exhibition chronology and a select bibliography. With its 350 colour photographs, this is the most important and authoritative monograph ever published on Marcel Broodthaers.

The exhibition of “Programmed Art” was inaugurated in the Olivetti Store in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, Milan, on 15 May 1962. The name Arte Programmata was coined by Bruno Munari, who launched the initiative, and Umberto Eco, the theorist of kinetic art as a paradigm of the “open work”, was responsible for the catalogue. The young and very young artists included the Milanese Gruppo T (Anceschi, Boriani, Colombo, Devecchi and Varisco) and Gruppo Enne from Padua (Biasi, Costa, Chiggio, Landi and Massironi) together with Enzo Mari and Munari. Others were to join during the show’s two-year tour. Packed in crates painted orange with the name Olivetti clearly evident, the works are a small but important symbol of the Italy of the economic boom and the fruitful wedding of avant-garde art and industrial research. The show was in fact produced and sponsored by Olivetti, the first company ever to act in such a capacity, in the period of its venture into electronics and production of the Elea 9003, the world’s first transistorized mainframe computer. Fifty years on, this book not only reconstructs the show through the works and the documentation of its genesis (including the anastatic reproduction of the original catalogue) but also takes a broader look at the electronic adventures of Olivetti, a company that sought to address the social and cultural implications of the dawning digital era.

Conceived by Giulio Paolini, one of the best-known and most acclaimed conceptual artists, this book takes stock in a certain sense of a life lived in the art world both as a leading participant and as an observer of the key stages in its evolution over the last forty years. It open with a text in which the artist uses words to illustrate his philosophical and artistic stance. Short pieces written by figures on the art scene close to the artist then introduce the nine thematic sections into which the nearly 150 collages created specifically for this project are divided. In keeping with Giulio Paolini’s international prominence, the final section presents English translations of all the texts.

The 'analytical line' that emerged in artistic debate in the sixties led to a significant change in the role of photography, the consequences of which are still felt today. In those pivotal years, photography was emancipated from technical virtuosity for its own sake, and opened up to new conceptual practices. Finally legitimsed as art, it became the object of intense theoretical and linguistic analysis. Marinella Paderni starts out from this historical premise to document the work of artists who, from the mid nineties to the present, have metaphorically taken up the legacies of that conceptual season, forging continuity between the avant-garde movements of that period and today's currents in photography. Her analysis examines theoretical debates on the 'reinvention of the medium' and outlines the last two generations of contemporary Italian photography: a scenario that bears witness to the emergence of original visual practices and a multifaceted reflection on photographic language in the era of the dematerialisation of reality.

In an age where ideologies and schools of thought have lost the capacity to forge strong cultural models, where national identities are gradually dissolving into a global context, and the distinctive characteristics of individual aesthetic languages faded out some time ago in favour of contamination, it is legitimate to ask whether we can still consider the contemporary period in terms of one single medium - in this case sculpture - within the boundaries of a specific national context. With these questions in mind, Alessandra Galasso explores the roots of contemporary sculpture in its many facets and declinations, traces its origines and presents the most recent work of the Italian artists engaged in this expressive genre. Her analysis commences from a historical perspective, embracing the entire sculpture tradition of the 20th century, and the radical changes that characterised it, then looks to the italian art panorama of the last decad, identifying original visual strategies and new interpretations of our complex reality. The thirty artists presented in Laboratorio italia - young italian sculptors, all share the awareness of combining old identities with new multicultural contexts, the practice of recovering traditional aesthetic canons with the desire to reinvent them from a new angle, and new materials. All the artists blend experimentation and tradition in their own ways, and combine their own personal stories with the Zeitgeist.

The book offers a comprehensive view of Nanda Vigo’s artistic production, from the sixties up to her last artworks in 2005. An exhaustive critical essay, edited by Dominique Stella, presents Nanda Vigo’s career, emphasizing her interdisciplinary approach rather than the traditional and restrictive classification of the artist as architect and designer. The book is divided into three sections: art, architecture and design, each introduced by unpublished texts by Tommaso Trini, I.J. Schoonhoven, Ettore Sottsass and Lucio Fontana, which highlight her talent in combining such different artistic expressions. Nanda Vigowas born in Milan and has studied Architecture in Losanna. After some professional experience in the United States she came back to Milan to work with Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni and Giò Ponti. She joined actively major European movements of artistic experimentation such as Gruppo Zero, Aktuel and Licht und Bewegung, cultivating an interdisciplinary link between architecture, art, design and the environment. She now lives and works in Italy and Africa.

Laboratorio italia documents the generation of Italian painters which began working at the end of the nineties and the start of the new millenium, with the aim of showing how many things have changed in the space of a decade. The work of the new generations, precisely thanks to artists' daily use of the web, more often than not speaks in terms influenced by the new globalized culture. The themes, forms, styles and approaches of young Italian painters are not that far removed from those of other Western countries. In some way the advent of the internet has brought an end to genius loci, from an artistic point of view too, and has fostered the germination of a myriad of 'glocal' expressions, influenced as much by global as by local culture.

Art is always contemporary. From this principle and the renewed collaboration between the Pinacoteca and the Accademia di Belle Arti springs the exhibition Contemporary Brera. Fabro Garutti Kounellis Paolini, a tribute to four great artists whose names are variously associated with Brera. The exhibition promotes the active presence of Contemporary Art in a historic museum such as the Pinacoteca, in keeping with the well-established role of the Palazzo di Brera as a laboratory for innovation. At the same time, it updates the revolutionary message of Processo per il museo, organized by Franco Russoli in the short-lived 1970s season of his career, encouraging visitors to experience the palace as a dynamic space in which the arts undergo a constant rebirth. On display are Luciano Fabro’s Groma per Spinoza, Io (L’Uovo) and Modo di mettere le lenzuola, and new installations have been especially designed by Alberto Garutti, Jannis Kounellis and Giulio Paolini for the rooms of the Pinacoteca, from the spacious Napoleonic halls to the chapel of St. Joseph – where they stand in direct and ‘simultaneous’ contact with the masterpieces by Raffaello, Bernardino Luini and Bramantino. This juxtaposition of works from different periods confirms and renews the ultimate significance of exhibiting art, as well as the role that the Palazzo di Brera is seeking to reclaim: that of a venue for observation, discovery and personal, inner research, always open to the contemporary.

A single place with three projects: Brera Palace tells its story, revealing its soul in all its glory through three projects. For the first time, with ‘Accademia aperta,’ students and professors open the doors to the classrooms of the Academy’s ten schools, offering visitors the unique possibility to observe the daily activities of its studios and workshops up close, while ‘Ai confini del quadro. Brera anni sessanta-settanta’ (Beyond the Frame: Brera in the 60s and 70s) puts the spotlight on historical figures of that unique era who brought international fame to Brera and its district, where “art-making” was evolving through the constant interchange both inside and out of the palace walls. ‘Bagnoli, Curran, Lim, Pistoletto, Richter. Installazioni nel Palazzo di Brera’ brings visitors into the world of contemporary art as the entire building thanks to its natural, centuries-old tradition of opening its historical spaces –  the Academy of Fine Arts, Braidense National Library, Botanical Garden, Astronomical Observatory and Art Gallery – fills with dynamism, to dialogue and interact with the new in search of unexpected parallels and convergences. Thus, past, present and future are the trajectories along which the original calling of this “encyclopaedic palace” manages to constantly express and revitalize itself. In the end, Brera puts its patrimony in touch with the contemporary world, activating a process that increases its value and engages the legends of yesterday and the talents of today and tomorrow.   Cover Photo: Cosmo Laera

Marco Petrus's work is a dizzying chromatic and compositional swirl soon transmuted into a journey through the buildings of countless cities, to which the trained eye will be able to assign names and precise paternity from one painting to the next. An opportunity for recognition but also surprise, for an unusual view of something known that the artist's mimetic ability is able to recreate on canvas. A walk through Helsinki, Milan, Marseilles and Naples but above all through the nuances and geometrics of an authentic ideal atlas of 20th-century and contemporary architecture.

I think that the solution to the possible conflict between Busci as architect and as painter lies in this original dialectic, a kind of obstacle course: the redemption, sublimation and evanescence of the pictorial sign as against the harshness of reality.The delicate strokes of a deft calligrapher delineating dark gleams, nocturnal lights, hypnotic monochrome landscapes of obscure foreboding. A dark vision of the urban drama of the world. A sort of de Pisis in reverse, where the gracefully choreographic movements of the entranced artist's brush give way to scenarios of metropolitan apocalypse with monochrome lyrical and theatrical overtones.

Island: the word conjures up isolated places we nonetheless seek to reach, touching the realm of the real and the imaginary, the concrete and the abstract. It inspires a myriad of artistic, cultural, linguistic, philosophical and musical reflections, a flow of sensations and stimuli that spring and spread from an idea and a place. Remo Salvadori is our guide to this infinite world, drawing on a project he carried out on Isola Comacina, an island that the King of Belgium gifted to Italy in 1920, and which was then entrusted to the Brera Academy to create a place for artistic and cultural events. The Academy’s project for developing Isola Comacina was guided by the atmospheric photographs of the island taken by Paola di Bello. Remo Salvadori, artist and lecturer, worked for two consecutive years with Academy students on the concept of island, as a destination and meeting place, gathering the works of 80 young artists. He then set about involving more than 50 writers, asking them to contribute a piece of writing about the idea of island. The result is a unique publication that alternates text and images, combining an educational programme with artistic projects, and bringing together poetry and conceptual developments, reflections and visual pleasure. The contributors include Alfredo Albiani, Flavio Ambrosini, Stefano Andi, Haim Baharier, Susanna Janina Baumgartner, Marco Biraghi, Sofia Boffardi, Roberto Borghi, Enric Bou, Giovanni Bruno e Francesca Varalli, Angelo Capasso, Letizia Cariello, Alessandro Carrera, Laura Cherubini, Antonella Commellato, Francesco Correggia, Bettina Della Casa, Paola Di Bello, Alessandro Di Pietro, Roberto Favaro, Rachele Ferrario, Massimo Venturi Ferriolo, Giuliano Fuortes, Romano Gasparotti, Daniele Geminiani, Giovanni Iovane, Gérard-Georges Lemarie, Sandro Levi, Elisabetta Longari, Giorgio Magni, Marco Magni, Olivia Mair Cacciari, Daniele Nani, Giovanni Ozzola, Loredana Parmesani, Gianluca Poldi, Isabella Puliafito, Elena Quarestani, Roberto Rossi Roberti, Carla Sanguineti, Monica Scaccabarozzi, Cesare Serratto, Tetsuro Shimizu, Pier Luigi Tazzi, Ida Terracciano, Roberto Tresoldi, Francesca Valli and Luca Vitone.