Ca' Pesaro Galleria Internazionale di Arte Moderna - Gianni Fabbri - Sguardi sulla Vita, sull'Arte e sul Mondo

photograph courtesy Gianni Fabbri

"His gaze spans the history of art and architecture, embracing subjects that blend high and low, current events and memory, the passing of life and the memories it leaves behind."

Elisabetta Barisoni

curator

Ca' Pesaro Galleria Internazionale di Arte Moderna

Gianni Fabbri - Sguardi sulla Vita, sull'Arte e sul Mondo

At Ca’ Pesaro – Galleria Internazionale di Arte Moderna, the exhibition Gianni Fabbri. Sguardi sulla Vita, sull’Arte e sul Mondo - curated by Elisabetta Barisoni - until January 25. - the drawings also presented an opportunity to renew the museum’s Project Room, now adapted to host Fabbri’s drawings and future exhibitions. 

Ultima Cena di Silvio Berlusconi

free interpretation of the scenic impact of Tintoretto's Last Supper

The drawings on display were largely created in recent years but originate from Fabbri’s long experience as an architect and professor of Architectural and Urban Design at IUAV. In that academic and professional context, freehand drawing served as a crucial tool for both the interpretation of past and present architecture and the development of new design ideas. Over time, this practice evolved to include the use of collage, incorporating figures borrowed from painting and sculpture to function simultaneously as symbolic elements and spatial references.

Exhibition View

photograph courtesy Gianni Fabbri

"His personal and intimate reflections on the dimensions and events of life, delivered with energy and imagination, and at times a healthy dose of irony, underscore how fundamental the utopian and visionary dimension is to architectural practice."

Elisabetta Barisoni

After concluding his academic and professional career, Fabbri’s drawings acquired a fully autonomous expressive role, becoming a means to reflect on the passing of time, personal and emotional states, the history of art - particularly the representation of the female body—and contemporary issues such as politics, religion, and environmental crises. These works form a series of - glimpses - onto life, art, and the world, often filtered through a gently ironic gaze.

Donne di Rubens sotto un Cavalcavia

inspired by the poem Le Donne di Rubens - Wislawa Szymborska

"Freehand drawing has always been my key tool, and over time 

I began adding collage elements from 

painting and sculpture."

Gianni Fabbri

photograph courtesy Gianni Fabbri

The exhibition catalogue includes a section titled - Testimonianze -  in which six figures from different cultural and professional backgrounds offer brief personal interpretations of the drawings. The contributors are Alberto Ferlenga, Domenico Luciani, Giandomenico Romanelli, Giovanni Soccol, Manuel Orazi, and Renato Bocchi -  together with an introduction by Elisabetta Barisoni - they underscore the multidisciplinary nature and interpretive richness of Fabbri’s work.

 

Pin It

Venezia - Ca' Pesaro - Galleria Internazionale d'Arte Moderna - Terry Atkinson - The Artist as a Semantic Engine

"The exhibition explores the tension between 

thought and vision, between concept and image"

  Ca' Pesaro - Galleria Internazionale d'Arte Moderna   

Terry Atkinson - The Artist as a Semantic Engine

The exhibition at Ca' Pesaro - Terry Atkinson - The Artist as a Semantic Engine - curated by -  Elisabetta Barisoni and Elena Forin - until March 1 -  presents some crucial phases of the work of Terry Atkinson, one of the most important English artists of recent decades. Recently added to the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, his work belongs to the strand of International Conceptual Research. It's uniqueness, however, consists in having interpreted profound theoretical contents in a vocabulary with a very strong visual value.

Terry Actor - Enola Gay - 1992

...from "We" to "I"

In 1968, Terry Atkinson co-founded Art & Language with David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin and Harold Hurrell to question entrenched artistic practices and representations. Their critical stance attracted nearly fifty artists between 1968 and 1982. Over time, Atkinson distanced himself from the group’s evolving ideology, feeling that conceptualism had become “calcified", and in 1974 he abandoned the group's approach to return to that of a solo artist - from "We" to "I".

The Russell Series -1995

Curators - Elena Forin and Elisabetta Barisoni

"A profound reflection on the central theme of war and on role as a means of awareness and engagement."

When he left Art & Language he was thirty-five years old and already had a solid and fully aware artistic career behind him. The field he explores is that of the present in which he lives and whose dynamics he questions. Wars, which he considers forms of political action conducted by other means, are one of his fields of research, but the urge to examine the language of art itself has always been at the centre of his interest.

Goya Work - Letter from the Artist - Series 2 No. 6

Family-map modernist surface tourer. Foreground/background Xeroxes.

Ruby and Amber in front of the incinerators at the preserved

Natzwiller-Struthof Memorial Camp - August 1985.

Background/foreground surface mutant. Dear Modernism - 1986

"A study of the value of time and of humanity’s aptitudes 

as engaged with time itself."

For over sixty years, Atkinson has linked the dynamics of human history to those of aesthetics, intertwining acts of composition with human actions. His work forms a map of images, symbols and texts, none of them neutral, each exposing the power structures embedded in messages. It is a sustained inquiry into time, its value, and humanity’s ways of engaging with it.

Draped Head - 1986  

Easter Lily Booby trap connected to iradiating inscriptions of the names of some votaries x-rayed into the wall of the bunker... - 1986

"A study of the value of time and of humanity’s aptitudes as engaged with time itself."

A large painting on paper dedicated to the Vietnam War opens the narrative concerning Atkinson's use of painting as a form of political and moral analysis.

In rock n'roll consumership "working class" is a null class ... 

Private Caprichos no.73-Face, Vietcong, South Vietnamese Ranger, 

Private Buddy Holly-Face, Vietcong, South Vietnamese Rangers, 

The Plain Reeds -1976

The exhibition presents some of his best-known series: Enola Gay - Grease Works Goya Series - American Civil War - the very powerful papers of the - Russell Series - and a large body of drawings from the 1960s.

This - 1996

Pin It