Catalogue

Contemporary art has made its way into numerous productive universes over the last few decades and art enterprises modelled on their ethical counterparts have sprung up all over Europe. The Dutch industrialist Akzo Nobel has created a foundation that hosts artists in residence. The French bank Neuflize OBC and the Belgian group Lhoist, a world producer of lime, commission works from contemporary photographers. The Italian TESECO group, specialized in the environmental treatment of waste, has created a workshop of contemporary art. The Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin was born as a joint venture between the Deutsche Bank and the Guggenheim Foundation. This interest in art is not, however, confined to major corporations but also affects small and medium-sized firms, and seldom takes the form of one-off sponsorships designed solely to bolster company image. Unlike the American model, which is more oriented towards consumption, the European appears to see art as an investment whose profit is to be found in the contribution made to the development of a sense of collective responsibility as regards the social environment and the assertion of cultural identity. This is an alliance that in turn works to the benefit of art, especially the art of today. Deeply convinced of this, Lisbonne and Zürcher start from the French model but work on the European scale to identify, country by country, sound entrepreneurial strategies and methods in support of projects, the commissioning of artworks and the creation of company collections and foundations. The authors highlight the ability of art, within corporate structures, to facilitate the expression of identity and convey cultural values capable of enriching the everyday life of personnel. As Pier Luigi Sacco points out in his preface, it is for all these reasons that contemporary art is not losing its appeal with the economic crisis but proves on the contrary capable in such circumstances of offering a salutary change of viewpoint, a way of looking at the facts of life through new eyes. Nor is it forgotten that “the art market, unlike the financial markets, handles works whose significance is not confined to the return they promise and that can indeed be regarded during a period of slump first of all as fraught with meaning, as opportunities to understand the world in which we live and even ourselves to some extent”.

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 decade, 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.

This volume is a double portrait of painters Zoran Mušič and Ida Barbarigo, depicting them from their first meeting in Trieste in spring 1944 until Mušič’s death in 2005. He was a Slovenian, born on the fringes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to a family of vintners, in a town whose name means a small hill. In 1944 he was over 30 and had already been to Venice and met Ida’s father, the painter Guido Cadorin (famous for the panels in the “Room of Pure Dreams” at D’Annunzio’s Vittoriale) by whom he was immediately fascinated. Ida was 20, she had always painted, and was enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts. She was descended from the Cadorin, originally from Cadore, who owned one of the oldest sculpture workshops in Venice. Zoran’s exhibition in Trieste left her unimpressed and she was not at all attracted to the reserved young artist with kind eyes. But their lives, whose most significant moments are described on these pages, were destined to be forever intertwined: from their first meeting in Trieste to Mušič’s deportation to Dachau; from his return to Venice in a state of exhaustion, to his courting and then marrying Ida in 1949; from the early years of married life in Venice, a crossroads for many artists – Arturo Martini, Virgilio Guidi, de Chirico, De Pisis, Campigli – to the Paris period and the friendships, acquaintances, and relations with the Galerie de France.   Two lives devoted to painting and narrated in this book through a hundred unpublished photographs from the period.

Dominique Laugé is a well-known photographer in the advertising world. L’occhio incantato presents his latest production, his photographic quest in the ever-changing natural environment in search of lights and shadows that bring to life sea surfaces, glaciers, volcanic ashes, autumnal woods, flowery meadows. His works immediately remind of another famous photographer, Ansel Adams, but for Dominique Laugé the commitment is not limited to the photographic technique and the subjects to be portrayed, but spans to the medium to print his work on, the paper. For this series of pictures, Laugé selected a hand-made paper, produced in Sicily, especially fine-tuned so as to enhance the photos’ light and contrast; in the book, within the limits of industrial production, the publisher has paid particular attention to the paper so as to reproduce the same sensations given by original artworks.

Throught time, only few books have been devoted to Rome, as artists have always been in awe of the Ethernal City. As many other photographers, Mimmo Jodice waited many years before facing such a project, but his most recent works, especially the one on the myth of the Mediterranean, can be regarded as preparatory to the myth of Rome. Jodice’s eye spans from the ruins of the Ancient Rome to the Renaissance, Baroque and modern architectures, guiding us in a long journey through time and history. The book is a project commissioned by the publisher to Mimmo Jodice and is an independent publication with no connection to any exhibition or event. The volume includes texts by Richard Burdett, Centennial Professor in Architecture and Urbanism at the London School of Economics and currently chief adviser on architecture and urbanism for the London 2012 Olympics, and Cornelia Lauf, art historian and curator currently teaching at the faculty of Arts and Design at IUAV in Venice.

This work constitutes the first monograph on Miltos Manetas and focuses on his work of the period from 1997 to 2007, thus offering a point of reference for collectors and those involved in the world of art with an interest in the young artist. The array of illustrations provides an overview of his oeuvre, the large oil paintings on canvas with broad expanses of bright colour and marked chromatic contrast that confirm Manetas as an authentic modern painter.

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.

This monograph gathers the diverse production of an artist of multiform skills: from the hand-sewn felt puppets (IllegalAliens) to his crochet works, from his big format pen drawings to his visual poetry. These pages contain an interview to the artist edited by Alessandra Galasso, an unpublished short story by Tatiana Carelli inspired by Aldo Lanzini’s works, and a rich iconographic apparatus. Aldo Lanziniwas born in Sondrio (Italy) in 1968. He studied at the Accademia di Brera in Milan and specialized in multimedia with a Master at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. His IllegalAliens have gained great success and have been reviewed on many international art and fashion magazines (Cosmopolitan, Elle, Flash Art, Vogue, Time Out New York) in Italy, France, Holland and United States.

Contemporary artists meet the challenge of producing artworks with every-day materials, tools and media; and videogames are among them. How can we make art with videogames? Miltos Manetas portrays the hardware and the players in his paintings; Todd Deutsch takes pictures of game players during exhausting contests; Tobias Bernstrup creates music performances and invents fabulous worlds; Eddo Stern builds fortresses and ships animated by videos; Jon Haddock uses game graphics to reproduce news items; Alison Mealey and Delire re-program the game so as to turn it into a sort of “automatic painting machine”. The book is a unique publication for his span (32 international artists, over 320 colour pictures) and in-depth analysis, the first reference book for all art expressions made with and on videogames, an attempt to free videogames from being “evil machines” and grant them a new recognition as cultural medium. The volume addresses the international public and devotes to the Italian readers a full translation of all critic texts.

This monograph contains an interview to the artist edited by young critic Ivan Quaroni and a short story by Italian renowned writer Tiziano Scarpa. Thanks to a rich iconographic section, the book presents the voluminous works of this talented representative of the Videogame Art. For many years the Milanese artist Mauro Ceolinhas translated and rewritten images with a technique that is the evolution of traditional painting. Inspired by Pop Art aesthetics, Ceolin analyzes the amount of information surrounding us and selects a series of images to be visually filtered using the vectorial drawing technique. These subjects are taken from the ultra-realistic world of natural catastrophes, from the cybernetic and mass-media environment of videogames and music, from the visual reconstruction of the headquarters of worldwide multimedia majors such as Sony, Google, Oracle, and Intel and from the world of comics. Ceolin uses his deliberately flat style to underline the topicality of various genres often considered obsolete, like portraiture or landscape painting.

In questa monografia Ivan Quaroni, attraverso un’intervista all’artista, ne documenta il percorso creativo dall’esordio con le sculture fino all’approdo ai grandi quadri dell’ultima fase di produzione. Le figure filiformi di Valeria Agosti Nelli, siano esse disegnate o scolpite, sono la sigla di uno stile unico, maturato attraverso anni di disciplinato lavoro. Nel volume sono riprodotti i disegni e le opere realizzate con l’impiego di materiali fragili ed effimeri come la carta, il legno, la lana e la cartapesta. Completa la monografia il racconto inedito dal grande scrittore Roberto Piumini, evocante le suggestioni delle opere della Agosti Nelli.

The volume is based on the original project by Keith Haring for the catalogue, which was never produced, of his great solo exhibition in Milan in 1984 at the Galleria Salvatore Ala. The book contains excerpts from Keith Haring Journals, in which he describes his life and work in Milan, an interview with the gallery manager Salvatore Ala, an essay by the curator which analyzes the 1984 exhibition and pinpoints its historical importance for Haring and the city of Milan. At the end of the volume a press review brings back to life the voices of journalists and critics, the atmosphere of the very moment. A large amount of colour and black-and-white pictures accompany the texts, including the photos of the works of art especially created for the exhibition, various historical shots of Haring working in the gallery, pictures from the inauguration portraying Haring and his many guests. Keith Haring is the highest expression of the social and artistic unrest of the eighties called graffiti art. Keith Haring was a real artist, a symbol of the era of comics as well as the cultural influence of the Maya and pre-Colombian populations, of Japanese pictograms and Picasso’s revolutionary artwork. His choice to use sprays, markers and paints instead of traditional instruments and traditional surfaces highlights his radical behaviour, his preference for a newer and independent style. His images are “universal” and have become a landmark in the contemporary iconographic heritage.