Corrado Levi

Corrado Levi’s Motosauro (Motosaurus), 1991, seems a bit like something found in a natural history museum: It’s a spinal column of sorts, comprising motorcycle helmets hung from the ceiling of the first room in the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Bergamo. To the right of this work is Punte da trenta, 1990, a group of paintings bought from street markets, works that Levi then covered with sheets of white Plexiglas, each perforated with a number of equal-size holes that afford glimpses of the underlying paintings. Pieces nearby include Case cigogna (Stork Houses), 1998, a set of architectural drawings depicting residential buildings imagined as “containers” that can be easily superimposed, and Libreria Escher (Escher Bookcase), 1995, a module that can be arranged individually or in multiples, forming slightly tilted shelves that keep their books in order. And there are more such works, arranged along a route devoted to Levi’s work that proceeds up the staircase spaces and throughout the entire second floor of the museum.

“Corrado Levi—18 modi di progettare ad Arte” (Corrado Levi—18 Ways of Making Art) is not a traditional retrospective but rather an exhibition project that investigates a process applicable to various realms of Levi’s aesthetic research. In accordance with the artist’s wishes, the works he has created over the past fifty years have been disassembled into parts and then shown aggregated into new categories. In 2002, Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, cocurator of this show, described Levi as “an outsider in a world of specialists . . . a man of the future because he is a man of the past in an interdisciplinary, Renaissance sense.” Indeed, as corroborated by the pieces on view, the working modes of Corrado Levi—architect, writer, artist, boxer—continue to elude easy categorization.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.