Ida Panicelli

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  picks December 05, 2022

  Daniela Comani

  Daniela Comani analyzes the patriarchal structure of society and the family, where clichés around gender roles are hard to eradicate. Rewriting history through innovative narrative strategies, she subverts notions of gender with a mix of irony and aching awareness. For example, in the artist’s book Ich war’s. Tagebuch 1900–1999 (It Was Me. Diary 1900–1999, 2002/2005), Comani provides a firsthand account of major events of the past century, casting herself as the sole protagonist in each.

  Over the past ten years, Comani has collected newspaper reports on incidents of domestic violence and femicide

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  print October 2022

  “Mirror Image: A Transformation of Chinese Identity”

  The seven artists in this exhibition, all born during the 1980s, address a number of issues—political, social, sexual—in a variety of media. But at the core of their investigations is a desire to understand what Chinese identity might look and feel like today. As she did in her seminal 2018 book, Brand New Art from China: A Generation on the Rise, Barbara Pollack, the show’s guest curator (along with Hongzheng Han, a guest curatorial assistant), examines this “post-passport” group of artists, whose practices are influenced by international travel, global views on society and history, and

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  print Summer 2022

  Bertina Lopes

  For the opening of its new venue in Rome, this London gallery introduced Bertina Lopes, a little-known artist with a multicultural upbringing who inhabited many different social and political milieus. Born in 1924 in Mozambique—then a Portuguese colony—and of mixed race, she was sent to study in Lisbon at the age of twelve, first at the António Arroio School of Decorative Arts and later at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts. After returning to Mozambique in 1953, she taught art and began exhibiting her work in 1956, influencing local artists. On account of her increasing involvement in anticolonial

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  print March 2022

  “The Hare with Amber Eyes”

  Based on writer and artist Edmund de Waal’s acclaimed 2010 memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance, this show is a poignant history lesson about assimilation, anti-Semitism, dispersion, and exile. Images, objects, and words are deftly woven together to create a portrait of de Waal’s ancestors, the Ephrussis, a cosmopolitan Jewish banking family who famously owned a collection of Japanese netsuke—miniature carved sculptures from the Edo period, used to fasten pouches to the sashes of a kimonos. These exquisite items were passed down from generation to generation and traveled to

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  print October 2021

  Joyce Kozloff

  In September 2018, while working on Memory and Time, her public project at the Carroll A. Campbell Jr. Federal Courthouse in Greenville, South Carolina—unveiled this past summer—Joyce Kozloff was bewildered to find new Confederate flags decorating each gravestone in the local cemetery, dedicated to the hundreds of soldiers from that area who died during the American Civil War. Kozloff realized how deeply that conflict was ingrained in the Southern identity, and recognized the divisive power of that flag, those famous words by Mississippi-born novelist William Faulkner seeming tragically real:

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  picks July 06, 2021

  Frederic Tuten

  Most famous for his ebullient 2019 memoir, My Young Life, the octogenarian author and art critic Frederic Tuten, encouraged by his lifelong friend Roy Lichtenstein, returned to painting and drawing while in his sixties after a decades-long break. In 2013, he began working on a series of pictures—intimate scenes of cozy interiors featuring elegant lamps, flowerpots, teacups, and kitchen tables—which he would regularly post to his Instagram.

  But, recently, he left the confines of this small domestic world and with ink, crayon, pastel, and oil paint on cardboard, started making more complex and

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  print Summer 2021

  Lulù Nuti and Delfina Scarpa

  In this exhibition, “Nuti.Scarpa: È questa la prima o l’ultima notte sul nostro pianeta?” (Nuti.Scarpa: Is This the First or the Last Night on Our Planet?), Lulù Nuti and Delfina Scarpa embarked on the discovery of geographies and fragments of a world in transformation. The two young Roman artists’ explorations took them from the sky to the ocean depths as they passed through almost fairytale gardens between day and night. Nuti (born 1988), the more nomadic of the two, works in Rome and Paris and is a passionate ocean traveler who once spent a monthlong residency on a cargo ship. Scarpa (born

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  picks May 17, 2021

  Monica Carocci

  Since the 1990s, Monica Carocci’s medium has been analog black-and-white photography. But during the Italy’s March 2020 lockdown, she was unable to go to her studio to continue the series she was working on. Stuck at home, she started using a digital infrared Nikon, which rendered the “domestic” nature of fresh-cut tulips, calla lilies, and poppies in absurd cyan, gray, and pink tones. Later, when Italy shut down again last winter, she wandered alone through an empty Turin, thermally imaging its overgrown parks and the banks of the Po. The resulting landscapes describe a postapocalyptic world

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  print May 2021

  Alberto Savinio

  An eclectic artist with many talents—music, writing, painting—Alberto Savinio fully inhaled the avant-garde climate of the early twentieth century. Born Andrea de Chirico in Athens in 1891, he studied music in Munich, then arrived in Paris in 1910. Adopting the name Alberto Savinio, he made his debut in 1914 with Les chants de la mi-mort (Songs of the Half-Dead), a dramatic poem and a suite for piano. For Guillaume Apollinaire, he was a “poet, painter, and playwright, similar to the versatile geniuses of the Renaissance.” One of Savinio’s most intimate paintings, Le rêve du poète (The Poet’s

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  print March 2021

  Domenico Bianchi

  Domenico Bianchi is a secular alchemist. His research is conceptual, anchored to tutelary forefathers, all of them Italian: Gino De Dominicis, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz. He is especially indebted to Alighiero Boetti, from whom he has absorbed the ability to work within a given set of rules. When Bianchi started out in the Roman milieu of the early 1980s, the most pronounced trait of that post-Transavanguardia generation was what he calls “arrogance,” an excessive and bombastic attitude related to their reliance on certain colors, forms, and gestures. Bianchi takes inspiration from elsewhere—from

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  picks February 01, 2021

  Bruna Esposito

  Having previously explored the dangers of climate change through sound, odor, and taste, here Bruna Esposito turns her attention to an increasingly ubiquitous contraption once largely shunned in Italy, an object of both luxury and distrust: the air conditioner. The first installment in a cycle of exhibitions about sustainability, “Altri Venti - Ostro” raises questions about this appliance’s excessive energy consumption and the pollution wrought by the gases it emits (the show’s title borrows a word for the warm Mediterranean wind, and is to be followed by “Altri Venti - Scirocco,” “Altri Venti

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  print January/February 2021

  Corinna Gosmaro

  In a 1966 interview on French television, Pier Paolo Pasolini speaks of a phrase from Provençal poetry. “The nightingale sings “ab joy,” for joy. But ‘joy,’ in the Provençal language of that time, had a particular significance, one of poetic raptus, of exaltation and poetic intoxication. Now this expression, ab joy, is perhaps the key expression of my entire production,” he says, since it represents “this sort of nostalgia for life, this sense of exclusion that, however, does not diminish the love of life but increases it.” Pasolini’s statement inspired Corinna Gosmaro’s series “Ab Joy” (all