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,

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

print January 2020

Cesare Pietroiusti

This is a strange sort of retrospective. “Un certo numero di cose” (A Certain Number of Things) covers the whole span of Cesare Pietroiusti’s life so far, with one of the titular “things” for every year from his birth in 1955 up through 2019, when the show opened. Thus the exhibition, curated by Lorenzo Balbi with Sabrina Samorì, includes items related to the artist’s childhood and adolescence: report cards, family photographs, letters to Santa Claus, everyday objects. Pietroiusti’s intention was to include works—if that’s what they are—of indeterminate status, suspended between art and non-art,

print November 2019

Gerold Miller

Gerold Miller’s work can be interpreted as existing within a continuous tension between object and space, within a relationship where the artist’s sculptures or wall pieces literally open up to the space that hosts them and deconstructs it. This show featured works in which the space actively breaks the unity of the surface, including examples from several of the thematic series the German artist has been producing for more than a decade. While Miller’s conceptual point of departure is painting, he subjects the fundamental two-dimensional code of pictorial expressiveness to a sort of genetic

print September 2019

Roman Opalka

Like its now-closed opening chapter in Milan, the Venice installment of this extensive exhibition—which remains on view through November 24—features a selection from Roman Opałka’s famous series “OPALKA 1965/1–∞,” 1965–2011, along with earlier works that have rarely or never been seen in Italy. The show hinges on the decisive date of 1965, when, making a commitment that he would stick with until his death in 2011, the artist decided to devote himself to canvases bearing consecutive sequences of diminutive white painted numbers, from one to (theoretically) infinity, which he presented alongside

print May 2019

Giovanni Ozzola

The first room of Giovanni Ozzola’s recent exhibition “Octillion” contained three large, colorful paintings—Light Blue Wall, South Wall, and North Wall, all 2018. To make these works, the artist first used silicone lift an impression from the graffiti-covered walls of abandoned buildings and deserted bunkers along the coast of Tenerife, the Spanish island where he lives. After fixing the sheets of silicone onto wire mesh supports, he intervened with paint and sand, appropriating the anonymous markings, signs of the universal desire to leave a trace of one’s existence, and recontextualizing them

print February 2019

Francesco Vezzoli

One of Galleria Franco Noero’s two locations is right in the center of Turin, on the stately Piazza Carignano, surrounded by historic Baroque palaces that house museums, theaters, and famous restaurants. Perhaps it was precisely as a reaction to all this pomp that Francesco Vezzoli wanted to besiege one of these palaces with something vaguely indecorous. The gallery’s large windows were obscured by heavy curtains, the light from outside replaced by that emanating from a strip of red LED lights running along the baseboards and purple spotlights pointing at the stuccowork and pictorial decoration.

picks January 21, 2019

Leoncillo

In the last decade of his life, Italian sculptor Leoncillo abandoned the figurative mode that had won him acclaim to create abstractions that plumbed his material’s constructive properties and emotional resonances. For this exhibition, curator Enrico Mascelloni has brought together sixteen of these abstract works, each a testament to the master’s empathic approach and unremitting experimentation. Here, Leoncillo, known for his fluency in ceramics, allows the material to speak directly through an agitated modeling that scores the terra-cotta and contrasts it with enamel applied like an autonomous

print October 2018

Giuseppe Gabellone

For this solo show, Giuseppe Gabellone chose an off-site space, installing three works (all Untitled, 2018) at the Fonderia Artistica Battaglia, near Zero’s former location. The two large rooms in a stark, unfurnished industrial space seemed well suited to the extremely sober, almost minimal works that are the artist’s most recent creations. The large windows, moreover, allowed them to be seen in natural light, in keeping with the artist’s usual practice.

Interested in the signifying relationship between a work and its surroundings, Gabellone often inserts his sculptures into the void of expansive

print September 2018

Giovanni Anselmo

Giovanni Anselmo’s recent exhibition “Mentre i disegni misurano, la luce focalizza, i colori e le pietre sono peso vivo” (While Drawings Measure, Light Focuses, Colors and Stones Are Living Weight) took its title directly from works by the Arte Povera artist on view in the first room of the gallery. The series “Mentre i disegni misurano,” created over the course of a decade beginning in 1969, consists of eighteen sheets of drawing paper entirely covered in gray graphite. The artist sees these as details, on a one-to-one scale, of the word infinito (infinity), imagined as infinitely large. The

print Summer 2018

Mathilde Rosier

In a site-specific intervention at the Fondazione Guido Lodovico Luzzatto in Milan this past spring, titled“Figures of Climax of the Impersonal Empire,” French artist Mathilde Rosier established a dialogue with the house in which the great Italian intellectual and art critic spent his life, inserting her surreally inflected pictorial depictions among household furnishings and archival materials. In her concurrent gallery show, “Impersonal Empire, the Buds,” she modified the actual space, adding a wall, positioned diagonally to the entry corridor, that functioned as a screen for a video projection

print April 2018

Luca Maria Patella

The multifaceted artist Luca Maria Patella was born in Rome in 1934. Over the course of his long career, he has worked in various media, from film, sculpture, photography, and performance to object-related installation, not to mention writing, where his continual wordplay injects a strong measure of irony. Curated by Alberto Fiz, this small survey of Patella’s work from the late 1960s to the late 1980s originated at the Galleria Il Ponte in Florence, where it also included pieces tied to that city’s history. These examples of the artist’s “contextual” work were not, however, displayed at Galleria

print February 2018

Eva Marisaldi

This exhibition by Eva Marisaldi, her first solo show in Italy since 2014, was held in a historic gallery in the city where she lives. It showed the artist’s poetic, at times somewhat naive approach to technology in images that, as is typical of her work, seemed hermetic and enigmatic at first glance, but soon revealed their origins in experience.

The walls of the entire irregular space were intersected at eye level by a row of A4 (approximately letter-size) photocopies of a sequence of drawings: scenes of people on boats floating on a lake, taken from a sequence in Roman Polanski’s first feature

print January 2018

Jan De Cock

“Is it still possible today for art to exist outside of the rules and demands of the market?” It seems strange to read this question as the opening line of a commercial gallery’s press release, and stranger still to discover “communism” as one of the stated objectives of an artist working within the existing art system. And yet this was the case with Jan De Cock’s “Everything for You, Torino.” Apparently De Cock is working to critique the market from within. His own word for his practice is sculpturecommunism. To this end, he uses his studio as a design and exhibition space for his own work.

print October 2017

Paola Di Bello

Paola Di Bello’s most recent show in Milan consisted of two series of photographs: one recent, “Ora e qui, Milano” (Now and Here, Milan), 2016, and one spanning the past decade and a half, “Rear Window,”2000–16, created in New York. In both cases, images of the city, of urban landscapes, are shot from inside various apartments, looking out at streets and buildings, and in the case of Milan focusing on the Piazza del Duomo and the immediately adjacent streets. In both series, the views afford perfectly objective, realistic glimpses of the metropolises. What we see, however, looks far from real.

print September 2017

Liliana Moro

It had been some time since Liliana Moro has had a solo show of recent work in her native city of Milan, although earlier this year she participated in a two-artist show with Francesco Fonassi at Renata Fabbri. In keeping with Moro’s usual practice, “Ouverture,” her exhibition at Francesco Pantaleone—a young gallery from Palermo that has recently opened a new space in the Lombard capital—consisted of a very concise selection of work, in this case two sculptures and four drawings connected by the theme of still life. The first sculpture viewers encountered, Ouverture (all works 2017),

print May 2017

Mario Nigro

The Italian art of the period spanning the late 1940s through the 1970s is currently undergoing widespread reinterpretation. Under these circumstances, this exhibition of the work of Mario Nigro, a leading practitioner of a rigorous brand of abstraction, could not have been more timely. The show, accompanied by a catalogue with a text by Luca Massimo Barbero, documented two periods of the artist’s work, quite distinct but connected by his care for the relationship between the two-dimensional work, space, and time. It opened with Ritmo verticale (Vertical Rhythm), 1948, a surface rhythmically

print April 2017

Chiara Dynys

“Look Afar,” Chiara Dynys’s most recent series of works, derives from an experience the artist lived through personally, one that has all the characteristics of an extreme ordeal. She spent forty days in Abisko National Park in Swedish Lapland, nearly 125 miles north of the Arctic Circle, during the total darkness of the coldest months, December to February, staying in a shelter with nothing but the bare necessities for survival. Her purpose was to photograph the aurora borealis. Approximately eighteen thousand images produced during her stay formed the basis for this exhibition, curated by

print February 2017

Enzo Cucchi

Despite his long involvement in the painting-oriented movement Transavanguardia, Enzo Cucchi has recently focused on sculpture and drawing (for which he has always shown a predilection), using painting primarily as commentary on these two other mediums. This recent show at ZERO confirmed this preference; the most extraordinary works were three sculptures—housed within the gallery’s interior spaces and outside the entrance—and it does not seem an exaggeration to say “extraordinary,” as Cucchi’s poetic inspiration never fails to surprise.

When entering the courtyard space, viewers saw a

print November 2016

Igor Eškinja

Three large canvases, hung from the ceiling on metal slats, created a virtual space within the real space of the gallery. They were made of polyester—light, almost immaterial, translucent—and enabled viewers to see each other walking about the space: Even the slightest breath of air moved the diaphanous partitions. Onto these large fields Igor Eškinja has printed photographs mostly shot in Rijeka, the city in Croatia where he lives. Depicted are large, anonymous apartment blocks, devoid of any aesthetic value, built in the early 1970s in anticipation of the city’s industrial development,

Giorgio Verzotti