Back and Forth
From 26/09/2024 To 31/10/2024
Back and Forth inaugurates on 25 September 2024 and opens the autumn season of the Gallery Raffaella De Chirico contemporary art , starting off with an ambitious group show articulated from the works of twenty artists.
The works, with a production ranging from the 1960s to the present day, will be presented in an exhibition that aims to convey an overall view, including both the collaborations carried out over more than ten years and the new entries of more recent times. If it is true that in order to look ahead lucidly and imagine what the future holds, one must always remember past experiences and grasp the more or less significant moments, then the gallery with this group show proposes a reflection on the last thirteen years of activity and tries to retrace the threads, adding and predicting the future stages that will collaborate in the interweaving.
A common thread is therefore sought and found in a dialogue that always exists between past, present and future, manifested in this case in the use of 'non-colours', in the power of the sign and the artistic gesture.
A number of works by historicised artists will be exhibited, including Alberto Burri (Città di Castello, 1915 - Nice, 1995) and Hans Hartung (Leipzig, 1904 - Antibes, 1989), as well as Carol Rama (Turin, 1918 - Turin, 2015) and Henri Chopin (Paris, 1922 - London, 2008).
Two artists of the same generation, linked by a decades-long friendship and mutual esteem, Mirella Bentivoglio (Klagenfurt, 1922 - Rome, 2017) and Maria Lai (Ulassai, 1919 - Cardedu, 2013) will have their own space with two works in the collective: it was Bentivoglio, a verbo-visual artist, curator and feminist art critic, who introduced the Sardinian artist to the international scene by exhibiting her at the 1978 Venice Biennale, in the memorable exhibition Materialisation of Language. It is a tight thread (or more than one) that binds them: both investigate matter in its variable forms and are not content with two-dimensionality, creating conceptual objects that are the site of continuous experimentation.
The investigation that Maria Lai carries out with her looms, with her embroideries, takes her art into a mythological dimension (in this case that of the Three Fates who hold the destiny of humans in their hands), a dimension that is present in the work of another artist who will be exhibited, the Japanese Horiki Katsutomi (Tokyo, 1929- Cigliano (VC) 2021). His reflection on Homer's epic in the Odyssey is transposed into his canvases, in which he lives the archetype of the myth through an intimacy so powerful that it approaches the sacred.
The verbo-visual artist Elisabetta Gut (Rome, 1934 - 2024) is present in the exhibition with a paper from 1980; she had also exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1978 under the auspices of Mirella Bentivoglio, who writes about her:
"Negation and affirmation for this artist are identified. She was the first to use thread as a sign of erasure and musical writing, a pentagram and at the same time a string for inaudible vibrations. And it is precisely her surliness that guarantees her intensity." (Bentivoglio,1989)
Also on show is Elisabeth Scherffig (Düsseldorf, 1949), an artist who has lived in Milan since 1971 and who has always investigated urban space, producing maps, stratigraphic drawings that are the result of research into the area.
In this group show, many important moments of the gallery's early years are retraced, through artists and artists who made its exhibition history: Eva Sørensen (Herning, 1940 - Verbania, 2019), one of the artists featured in the first exhibition in 2011 and to whom the gallery dedicated an anthological exhibition in 2013; the artistic duo TTozoi, composed of Stefano Forgione (Avellino, 1969) and Pino Rossi (Naples, 1972), whose metamorphic works were presented in the gallery's second exhibition; the artist Corrado Bove (Bergamo 1974) - who in the last two decades has ventured into sculptural experiments working with wire mesh, Codice muto of 2006 is on show - will also be present with his latest research, digital photographs of his sculptures, on which he then works digitally and which are thus reworked and reconfigured into new two-dimensional works.
Gisella Chaudry (Palermo, 1989) is on show with two works that are part of the Trajectories series, works designed by the artist and embroidered in Pakistan, recalling her origins and her father's work as a tailor; Irina Gabiani (1971, Tbilisi) with a collage on canvas in which she has created organisms in which the micro and the macro coexist interconnected, investigating everything that surrounds us; Andi Kacziba (Budapest, 1974) with a small canvas that is the result of a performance first presented by the gallery in 2023 and last shown at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest.
The exhibition also includes a small Virus by Sergio Ragalzi (Turin, 1951 - 2024) - an artist to whom the gallery has dedicated several exhibitions, in the last year one dedicated to a pictorial cycle from the 1980s and one presenting a large sculpture alone - and a work by Nunzio Fisichella (Catania, 1968), an artist who works with lava sand and natural pigments and who last exhibited his work in Catania, in an exhibition curated by Raffaella De Chirico (Intervallo, 2024, Cappella Bonajuto).
For the occasion, the gallery also presents the work of artists exhibiting for the first time: a wall installation by Alessandro Armetta (Palermo, 1996), a polymateric sculpture by Federica Zianni (Rome, 1993) and a canvas realised through the use of natural painting mediums by Riccardo Angelini (Fermo, 1980).