Giorgio Verzotti

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  print May 2023

  Jimmie Durham

  Naples has devoted an expansive show to Jimmie Durham, who, after definitively bidding farewell to the United States in 1994, set up house in this city in 2015. Durham, who passed away in 2021 at the age of eighty-one, had many selves: He was an author of radical political statements, a self-identified Cherokee activist, an artist interested in relationships between art and science, a satiric humorist who loved wordplay, and a creator of elegiac verses. This exhibition, “humanity is not a completed project,” curated by Kathryn Weir, director of the Museo MADRE, unfolded over an entire floor,

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  picks December 22, 2022

  Thomas Schütte

  Thomas Schütte’s latest exhibition pairs a fleet of Murano glass sculptures, all made between 2011 to 2022, with more than three dozen works on paper. The selection focuses on portraiture, while also touching on some of the artist’s other motifs, such the three urns in varying colors, all 2020, and a trio of “glass ghosts”, all 2011, small emerald-hued figurines that formally recall Schütte’s anthropomorphic metal sculptures. Many of the glass pieces are exhibited on tall cylindrical steel bases, and, depending on the objects’ proximity to a window, the ambient light renders them transparent

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  print November 2022

  “Vita nuova. nouveaux enjeux de l’art en Italie 1960–1975”

  In her introductory catalogue essay for “Vita nuova. nouveaux enjeux de l’art en Italie 1960–1975” (New Life: New Issues for Art in Italy 1960–1975), curator Valérie Da Costa suggests that the show was “une histoire revisité,” a reconsidered history. What was being reconsidered was the narrative proposed by the exhibition’s single precedent in France, the legendary “Identité Italienne. L’art en Italie depuis 1959” (Italian Identity: Art in Italy Since 1959), an exhibition organized by Germano Celant at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 1981. In that show, Celant was rather uncharitable to artists

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  print December 2021

  Armando Andrade Tudela and Daniel Steegmann Mangranè

  Armando Andrade Tudela and Daniel Steegmann Mangranè’s response to an invitation by Alessandra and Francesca Minini to exhibit together in their Milan space was a show whose title, “Voler leggere la schiuma” (Wanting to Read the Foam), alludes to a line by Peruvian poet César Vallejo, whose poem “Intensity and Height” (1937) opens, “I want to write, but froth comes out.” The two artists, who share an interest in natural morphologies and their connection to artistic creation, set up a series of relationships, between one work and another and between the works and the space, arriving at what can

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  picks November 16, 2021

  Leiko Ikemura

  Japanese Swiss artist Leiko Ikemura is exhibiting for the first time in Italy with a selection of works, curated by Frank Boehm, covering roughly forty years of her activity and installed over the gallery’s four floors. Viewers first encounter a pair of large, gloomy paintings, completed in 2017. Together, the two very similar nocturnal landscapes of mountains surrounding deep indigo lakes (or are they volcanic craters?) give the show its title: “Before Thunder, After Dark.” Following this opening salvo are several drawings from the early ’80s, as well as a large untitled pastel from the same

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  picks June 22, 2021

  Kings

  This gallery stands at number thirty-two on a street where there is no thirty. Inspired by this infrastructural slippage, the duo known as Kings have transformed the address into Dancing30, announced by a neon sign at the building’s entrance. Detourning the space into a phantom nightclub, the artists, Daniele Innamorato and Federica Perazzoli, evoke those glittering days of disco, or simply dancing, as we called it when we were young. As with any good discotheque, the show mixes high and low: Kings have recycled imagery from the books Max Ernst used for his collage novel Semaine de Bonté (1934),

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  print May 2021

  Enrico David

  For his first exhibition at Gió Marconi, Enrico David exhibited exclusively paintings and drawings, after having participated in the 2019 Venice Biennale with a focus on sculpture. Between the two shows, the London-based artist seemed to have decided to offer his home country a complete sampling of his most recent production. This show’s title, “Cielo di giugno” (June Sky), suggested a naturalistic subject, but what awaited viewers were phenomena of an oneiric world: nature, yes, but transfigured. Even the press release really wasn’t one, almost functioning instead as a brief prose poem.

  The

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  print April 2021

  Franco Vimercati

  Franco Vimercati (1940–2001) was the artist with whom Raffaella Cortese opened her gallery in 1995. This show, “Un minuto” (One Minute), accompanied by a book full of illuminating essays and interviews, was curated by Marco Scotini, who emphasized the most rigorously Conceptual aspect of Vimercati’s work. If the term Conceptual designates an analysis of the specific language of an expressive medium, no definition better suits Vimercati and his inquiry into the nature of photography. His photographs—frontal shots of everyday objects, exclusively in black and white, most often grouped in ensembles—are

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  passages November 18, 2020

  Enzo Mari and Lea Vergine (1937–2020, 1932–2020)

  I SAW THEM FOR THE LAST TIME a few months before the lockdown. I went over to give Lea a copy of my book on Mario Merz, which she wanted as a gift, and with a dedication. They weren’t well. Enzo was still suffering the aftereffects of an operation on his head necessitated by a fall from a ladder on which he was trying to prune some wisteria on the terrace; Lea, by contrast, had “blundered,” resulting in a nasty sunburn on her legs. Daily life had betrayed them, in short. I left their beautiful Milanese home in a state of sadness at the fact that such two strong personalities, two leaders in

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  print October/November 2020

  Tomoo Gokita

  For the inaugural solo exhibition in Massimo de Carlo’s new space on the first floor of Milan’s magnificent Casa Corbellini-Wassermann, built in 1936 by architect Piero Portaluppi, Japanese artist Tomoo Gokita for the first time presented an exhibition of paintings in which color dominates, attributing the change to boredom after years of working almost exclusively in black and white. The works for which he is best known are based on images—often sourced from pornography, comics, or wrestling magazines—that the artist skillfully distorts or partially erases to create abstract compositions that

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  print May/June 2020

  Mario Schifano

  Qualcos’altro (Something Else), a gray enamel monochrome from 1962, lent its title to this exhibition dedicated to Mario Schifano’s monochrome period, from 1960 to 1962, when the young artist (1934–1998) first came to international attention. The catalogue was in newspaper format, featuring an essay by the show’s curator, Alberto Salvadori, and Riccardo Venturi. Most of the variously sized works on paper and on paper mounted on canvas featured in the exhibition still belong to Giorgio Marconi, father of the gallerist Gió Marconi. Viewers were able to once again admire, alongside other pieces,

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  print February 2020

  Olu Oguibe

  The works in Olu Oguibe’s “Cuba Project,” 2019, which developed out of a visit to a steelworks in Matanzas, Cuba, in February 2019, were made mainly out of discarded metal elements left over from the factory’s manufacturing process. In this exhibition, the artist presented them as he found them, without any modifications, albeit in carefully calculated groupings that suggested he has a scholar’s taxonomic instincts. It was not by chance that his introduction to the show was a display case, Untitled (all works 2019), filled with small rusty objects, salvage on a miniature scale, which he also