Marta Silvi

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  picks May 11, 2023

  Simone Forti

  In her work, artist, choreographer, dancer, and writer Simone Forti channels the subversive elemental forces of freedom and spontaneity. Born in Florence in 1935, she soon afterward fled with her family to the United States to escape rising anti-Semitism. Very active in the 1960s scene in New York, she evaded easy categorization as one of the pioneers of American postmodern dance.

  It was in the late ’60s that Forti revived her relationship with Italy, thanks in part to the efforts of Fabio Sargentini, owner of Galleria L’Attico in Rome. In the exhibition “Distant Lands,” various expressive

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  picks February 21, 2023

  Alessandra Spranzi

  The egg is the enigmatic object par excellence, perfect in its form as an incubator of life. Piero della Francesca suspended an egg over the head of his Brera Madonna (1472–74), capturing within it a mystery that would later return in the surreal atmospheres of René Magritte and Salvador Dalí.

  Les yeux les oeufs les jeux (Eyes Eggs Games, 2022), the image on the invitation for Alessandra Spranzi’s first solo exhibition in Rome, positions itself along these lines: a photo-engraved aluminum plate depicts a well-groomed adolescent boy wearing a slightly oversize jacket. He holds out his hands, above

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  picks November 29, 2022

  Tomaso Binga

  In 1971, for her debut exhibition at Studio Oggetto in Caserta, Italy, Bianca Pucciarelli Menna displayed her visual poetry under the male pseudonym of Tomaso Binga, proclaiming, “The artist is not a man nor a woman, but a PERSON.” Since that time, Binga has focused her practice on the deconstruction of gender and patriarchal codes, advocating for an understanding of the body as a place to inhabit, a material to shape, to decode culturally and socially.

  The exhibition “I write with my own wrist” surveys some of Binga’s enduring engagements with written language as a means to subvert dominant

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  picks November 14, 2022

  “Es-senza”

  The Proust effect is a phenomenon that draws its name from Swann’s Way, the first book of In Search of Lost Time. It describes the ability of our senses to access and activate memories long suppressed. With the exhibition “Es-senze,” curator Pier Paolo Pancotto attempts to unleash the power of smell—perhaps the most abstract and enigmatic of the senses—with the help of twelve international artists, including Giuseppe Penone, Bruna Esposito, Jason Dodge, and Nico Vascellari.

  Circling through the rooms of the second floor of the Palazzo Mocenigo, the exhibition path opens and closes with Fedele

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  picks March 07, 2022

  Jason Dodge

  In many cultures, the figure of the wolf is associated with primordial needs. Cut a Door in the Wolf, which seems to have been inspired by the idiom “keep the wolf from the door,” is the title conceived by poet CAConrad for Jason Dodge’s installation at the Museo MACRO. It consists of a single site-specific work that covers the entire ground-floor gallery with an assortment of debris including scraps of fabric and plastic, ink pens, teaspoons, pieces of sponge, batteries, lottery cards, and shredded paper. Viewers must struggle to make meaning from this mélange. Amid the carpet of rubbish,

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  picks September 13, 2021

  Anna Perach

  “Gasp” is the title Anna Perach's inaugural exhibition at the ADA gallery. The convulsive intake of exhaustion and shock, the onomatopoeic wheeze of those who flee, the attempt to recover one’s breath, it introduces us to the theme of this small yet stunning show: the objectification and subjugation of the female body through Western history.

  Daphne, 2021, a life-size sculpture of an acephalous and amputated female body in tufted yarn, reinhabits the pose of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s immortal nymph (1622-25), captured in marble at the moment she was touched by Apollo. Perach's work omits the male

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  picks September 01, 2021

  Prinz Gholam

  A theatrical device ante litteram, a filter that protects while hiding and nullifying individual expressions and characteristics, the mask has acquired particular psychological, social, and epidemiological valances in the last twenty months. In their first solo exhibition at an Italian institution, the Berlin-based artist duo Prinz Gholam (Wolfgang Prinz and Michel Gholam) fill the Mattatoio with drawings, sculptural objects, and performative gestures reflecting on this now-ubiquitous ancestral form, a form which, as playwright and novelist Luigi Pirandello observed a century ago, belies the

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  picks June 05, 2021

  Baldo Diodato

  In a previous group show, amidst works by Schirin Kretschmann and Yorgos Stamkopoulos, Baldo Diodato covered the gallery floor with an immaculate canvas so that visitors’ foot traffic acted as an unconscious brush, spreading colored pigments in involuntary shades and patterns. His current exhibition offers a visual transcription of that experience. The artist’s use of “collective frottage,” as he calls it, dates back to a 1974 performance at JFK Square in Philadelphia, which was repeated two years later at New York’s Alessandra Gallery. In each case, a sheet of carbon paper sandwiched inside a

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  picks March 12, 2021

  Stefano Canto

  Since 2009, Stefano Canto has been embarking on urban excursions in search of abandoned tree trunks drained of life, slowly consumed by fungal parasites, the outer casing often left intact. Once transported to his studio, the artist fills the husks with reinforced concrete, which quickly solidifies to generate a perfect impression of its cavities, or carie, the word that titles this precise, poetic exhibition curated by Giuliana Benassi. Sometimes, using a process similar to the indirect lost wax technique, Canto sections the bark into blocks that he uses to replicate the cast numerous times,

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  picks January 16, 2021

  Pier Paolo Calzolari

  In the midst of the pandemic, with museums closed and private spaces operating with reduced hours or by appointment, gallerist Sara Zanin has transformed an apartment in the San Saba neighborhood into an intimately domestic exhibition space and artist’s residence. The house, our constant visual, territorial, and mental horizon during this difficult year, becomes a place for experiencing and talking about art. The inaugural exhibition is devoted to Pier Paolo Calzolari, a key Italian artist who—while linked for many above all to his sculptural installations that arose in conjunction with arte

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  picks November 12, 2020

  Namsal Siedlecki

  “Nothing grows on diamonds / flowers grow in the dung,” goes a 1967 verse by Fabrizio De André, one of the most beloved Italian singer-songwriters of all time. Mvaḥ Chā, the word that provides the title for this exhibition by Italian American artist Namsal Siedlecki, refers to the compound of clay, cow excrement, and pula (a casing made from rice grains) traditionally used in Nepalese foundries to protect the wax forms that make way for bronze castings. This rough mortar, extracted from waste, constructs a coarse and resistant layer that adheres to the wax core, imprinting sinuous, abstract

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  picks September 25, 2020

  Caroline Achaintre

  In Caroline Achaintre’s one-person exhibition, watercolor, ceramic, bamboo, and wool are the protagonists of a narrative that seems to emerge from the viscera of creative expression. The French-born artist’s works take possession of the gallery space like three-dimensional biomorphic entities, even when simply hung on the walls like paintings. The porosity of their materials (paper, wool, clay) absorbs color, returning it to the gaze already digested, transformed. The viewer who enters the show is drawn down a meandering path that encourages the eye to continually shift from distanced looking