LUIGI DI SARRO.The living body of painting, curated by Paola Ballesi. June 7th-September 7th, 2018. Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Cologne

Following the stage on Stuttgart, the exhibition LUIGI DI SARRO.The living body of painting, curated by Paola Ballesi, opens in the spaces of the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Cologne. The exhibition continues the celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the death of Luigi Di Sarro.

“Di Sarro’s creativity investigates various artistic and scientific fields, such as painting, philosophy, poetry, mathematics, technology, which involved the aspects of the process more than those related to representativeness. His approach is rather analytical. We note that this diversity of interests is the result of his great curiosity and desire to deepen the issues he was dealing with. In the cycle of the gouaches of 1964 he repeated the motif of the square, and in the pictures partially realized with the “dripping” process, in which he sprays the canvas with color, he shows two different procedures, two opposite principles: repetitiveness and expressiveness. In his oil and acrylic paintings instead he experiments and plays with the three-dimensionality on the surface. Today his works offer a richness and a stratified meaning, which in the course of time have lost nothing of their artistic potential”, writes Maria Mazza, Director of IIC Cologne in the Prologue of the catalogue which offers a curatorial note and a large critical anthology.

On show 38 painting realized by Di Sarro between the Sixties and the Seventies with various techniques from gouache to oil, acrylic and mixed media that “decline the phenomenology of the sign born from the gesture of the body” – as Paola Ballesi explains – “With the ‘spelling’ of the body, understood in its variations, ranging from the physical presence of the painter on the canvas through the unique and continuous sign, to the ‘figuration’ of the body felt as a map of energy, Di Sarro subtracts the creation at each formal stylization. Perhaps he would have preferred, as an artist-physician, to make the language of art become a living body that acts and reacts in contact with new and different stimuli each time”.

SEGNI disegni e fotografie di Luigi Di Sarro, curated by Carlotta Sylos Calò – Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Warsaw (2018, May 30th-June 28th) and Krakow (2018, July 6th-September 6th)

The celebrations on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the death of Luigi Di Sarro go on with a series of events in Italy and abroad and the aim of spreading and deepening a multifaceted artistic production that is still considered highly topical today.

The tribute to Luigi Di Sarro, an artist active in the Sixties and Seventies – a period that is now being brought to the attention of the critics for the innovative pushes into contemporary art – wants to highlight his strong experimental vocation. An attitude and a need on the part of the artist who proceeded experimenting in all the fields and in all the expressive techniques with which he worked (besides photography, painting, drawing, sculpture and graphics). Italo Zannier writes in an essay on Di Sarro’s photographic research: […] but what is experimentation if not the result initiated by an idea? They are also the imprecise ‘photodynamics’ of Bragaglia as the ‘strobophotographies’, the ‘luminographies’, the ‘chronophotographies’, the “corporal” sequences of Luigi Di Sarro. These images are first of all results, not “trials”, as the “experiments” would be like. Experimentation is in fact implicit in doing and we do not know where it leads and when it will complete, if it will end; and woe, however, if we were to conclude, because every phase of it is already a result. […] Luigi Di Sarro – photographer, has realized his visual rite with an extraordinary expressive happiness, even lucid and dense but of irony, dramatic also, disturbing […]. (in I. Zannier, Luigi Di Sarro) Discovering Photography, 2001.)

In addition to the material kept in the Historical Archive dedicated to the artist, two substantial collections of photographic works are kept at the National Gallery of Modern Art and the National Institute for Graphics in Rome. Moreover, in 2009, some of the artist’s photographic works were acquired in the collection, and consequently also exhibited, in Paris by the Pompidou Center. The acquisition was curated by Quentin Bajac.

The ongoing archiving of the amount of work that the artist has left allows today to deepen and connect many issues, in the immediate not obvious. Numerous so far are the scholars who wrote about Di Sarro, who have studied a large part of his production, and many more are still under study. The occasion of the anniversary is to be a new and prolific opportunity to analyze a work that is increasingly revealed as a broad theorem argued in many directions, as if it were an encyclopedic atlas.

The exhibition SEGNI disegni e fotografie di Luigi Di Sarro curated by Carlotta Sylos Calò for the spaces of the Italian Institute of Culture in Warsaw and Krakow, in Poland,  is one of the many possible research about the links that Di Sarro studied and experimented. In the premises of IIC Warsaw are exposed some series of experimental photographs, a group of drawings and some etchings produced at the turn of the ’60s and’ 70s. 

Di Sarro’s research, writes the curator in the catalog published by the italian Institute of Culture: “became radicalized in terms of his experimental approach – dictated in part by his dual profession, given that Di Sarro is not only an artist but also a physician – and matured in terms of his irreverent use of materials (netting, bitumen, iron rods, brushes, pencils, photography) that could bring out particular evocations in the forms he created. In this context, the sign in particular took on an extraordinary power to generate forms and spaces, still (but now more consciously) without any real caesura between abstraction and figuration, thanks to the enduringly transversal nature of his approach to techniques”.

Following  the show and opening at IIC CRACOVIA (July 6th-September 6th 2018) pictures.

Following the Opening at IIC Warsaw (30 May-28 June 2018) pictures.

LUIGI DI SARRO.The live body of painting curated by Paola Ballesi 14th May – 1st June 2018 Rathaus Stuttgart

The celebration for the 40th anniversary of the death of Luigi Di Sarro continues. After the stage in South Africa, where the exhibition of Sculptures and Giantgraphies at the Edoardo Villa Museum of the University of Pretoria is still underway, Centro Di Sarro proposes a new exhibition of works, this time pictorial, at the Stuttgart Rathaus, in Germany. The international circuit takes place in partnership with the Istituti Italiani di Cultura. The exhibition titled LUIGI DI SARRO.The live body of painting is curated by Paola Ballesi, and realized with the collaboration of the Centro Studi Marche. On show 38 paintings realized by Di Sarro between the Sixties and Seventies with various techniques from gouache to acrylic. The opening will be on May 14th at 6.30pm.

FACING THE CAMERA 50 years of Italian portraits curated by MARCO DELOGU Istituto Italiano di Cultura New York

The Experimental self-portraits by Luigi Di Sarro on show at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in New York. The multiple show curated by Marco Delogu will open on March 28.

This exhibition chronicles fifty years of Italian history showcasing a series of portraits, by 25 photographers, in which stories, identities and heritage are narrated by the looks of the subjects, eyes staring directly at the camera, at the authors of the shots and, ultimately, at all of us. Curated by M. Delogu.

Italy is a country rich in history whose borders have been rather fluid throughout time. A melting pot of identities, the DNA of its inhabitants is most varied  (with a diversity up to thirty times greater than the European average).

This wealth is reflected and it is recognizable in the features of the Italians.

The exhibit begins with a group portrait taken at Portella della Ginestra by Fausto Giaccone twenty years after the horrible massacre, followed by Gianni Berengo Gardin’s pacifist nudes, Gastone Novelli’s portrait of Ugo Mulas (two great protagonists of the ’68), demonstrations and factories by Francesco Radino, the work on Bagheria by Ferdinando Scianna, Tano D’Amico’s work in ’77 (a very Italian experience, stemming from the ’68).
Then a photo by Emilio Tremolada (engaged alongside Franco Basaglia in the battle for the abolition of the asylums), the work of Lisetta Carmi on “transvestites “, and self-portraits by Luigi di Sarro.

In the eighties the tone becomes more intimate with photos of the “Australian from Tuscany” Stephen Roach, belonging to the famous series dedicated to his wife Fabrizia, and the portraits of the neighbors of George Tatge, in Umbria.

From the nineties the photographic portrait becomes more and more a collaboration of two: the photographer and his subject work together for the final image using symbols, backgrounds and landscapes. It is the case of Guido Guidi’s portraits, and the photos of cardinals, peasants and Romani people by Marco Delogu, where the main focus is on the gaze of the person, while the environment is just a background.

Moira Ricci is even part of her mother’s photographs, is at her side, producing very moving images. Nature is present in the portraits of Sabrina Ragucci and Alessandro Imbriaco; Jacopo Benassi increasingly eliminates every background until he gets to the white, while Antonio Biasiucci chooses the classic black for characters that come out of the shadows. The exstensive overview ends with two portraits by Paolo Ventura, where the photographic technique is blended with ancient pictorial practices.

On view until May 2nd 2018 Monday through Friday 10am to 5pm

LUIGI DI SARRO WORLD DISCLOSURE curated by Paola Ballesi EDOARDO VILLA MUSEUM UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA SOUTH AFRICA

March 2 – May 18, 2018

Inaugurated in Pretoria, South Africa, the exhibition with which the international celebrations for 40 years after the death of Luigi Di Sarro starts. The event is promoted by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Pretoria with the collaboration of the UP ARTS Department of the University of Pretoria. The images of the opening and the academic lecture.

 

 

LUIGI DI SARRO (1979-2019) CELEBRATION OF 40 YEARS AFTER DEATH WITH SHOWS IN ITALY AND ABROAD

Starting from February 24, 2018, on the occasion of the anniversary of the 40th year after the death of Luigi Di Sarro, the Centro di Documentazione della Ricerca Artistica Contemporanea Luigi Di Sarro presents a series of events in Italy and abroad, in order to make the multifaceted artistic production of Di Sarro, still considered highly topical today, known internationally.

The tribute to Luigi Di Sarro, an italian artist active in the Sixties and Seventies – a period that is now being brought to the attention of the critics for the innovative pushes brought into contemporary art – wants to highlight his strong experimental vocation. In the 2008 text (Edizioni Peccolo), Flaminio Gualdoni writes: “By learning, by working actively in several fields simultaneously, Di Sarro imagines being able to force clichés and conventional protocols, and to open up to art – that art is, however, his predominant, and in some ways absorbing passion – perspectives that, in times like these, seemed not only possible but necessary. Not worried about giving himself a recognizable expressive figure, well convinced that it is no longer a question of style or fashion, he immediately interprets his role as that of the pure experimenter, in debt only with the intensity of the work and the his intellectual sharpness, at the cost of expiating, in addition to the suspicion that the avant-garde professionalism reserved to an author as he atypical for training, also the no less tenacious suspicion reserved by the artistic system to spirits that are brilliant but not prone to the rules and regulations of the new , no less inflexible, we now know, of the old academics.
`Di Sarro shows that he does not care too much, embodying in the Roman scene of the sixties and seventies the role of the experimenter whose work in progress is assumed not rhetoric, but practice of life”.

The project – ideally launched by Di Sarro himself, who in a pen drawing had indicated the destinations on the terrestrial globe “Rome, New York, Tokyo and … who knows where” (at the extreme south of the world, perhaps, where it was never gone) – was enthusiastically received by the Director of the IIC of Pretoria, Anna Amendolagine, and therefore will begin its process, on 1st March 2018, just from Pretoria in South Africa, at the Museum of the University of Pretoria, which will host an exhibition of sculptures and giants drawings.

Other stages have already been defined: an exhibition of Di Sarro’s pictorial work in Stuttgart in Germany, with the collaboration of the Istituto Italiano di Cultura and the City of Stuttgart (in May 2018) and with the IIC of Colonia (autumn 2018); an exhibition of experimental photography of the ’70es will be at the IIC in Warsaw and Krakow in Poland in May-June 2018, and at the IIC of Rabat in Morocco, early 2019. More destinations are under construction.

LUIGI DI SARRO NEWS – “Quella notte a Roma” by Carla Cucchiarelli (Iacobelli editore) tells the life of Luigi Di Sarro

Would have had a radiant future ahead of him Luigi Di Sarro, but everything stopped on the night of February 24, 1979, when he was killed. It was the dark Rome of the years of lead. A stone’s throw from St. Peter’s Church, in a tragic accident at a checkpoint, his life was broken by gunshots. He was only 37 and was not the only innocent victim of the Royal law, against Terrorism. 254 dead and 371 injured are the tragic balance of the victims of this law in the first fifteen years of its application, from 1975 to 1990. Artist of merit and certain future, Luigi Di Sarro was at the same time also an attentive physician, who lived his profession as a mission.

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A travel lover, always ready to capture the sign of the times, he had been among the first in Italy to practice acupuncture, discovered during an artistic residency in Japan. His great passion, however, was the art in its many forms. To this fever he devoted much of his brief but intense life: an experimental artist of great courage, he was able to express himself in different languages, crossing with the same impetus the drawing, painting, sculpture, graphics and photography. Through the memories of family, friends, students and colleagues who always have a cheerful and carefree boyfriend in their hearts, Carla Cucchiarelli, journalist of the Rai regional news program, reconstructs a page of the history and the Roman art scene of the ’70s. Preface by Maurizio Fiasco. Afterword Alessandra Atti Di Sarro.

MIBACT: PASSEGGIATE FOTOGRAFICHE ROMANE – LA FOTOGRAFIA SPERIMENTALE DI LUIGI DI SARRO a cura di Carlotta Sylos Calò. 

On show, under the umbrella of “Passeggiate Fotografiche Romane” powered by MIBACT, the exhibition will runs untill the 30th of January 2018, LA FOTOGRAFIA SPERIMENTALE DI LUIGI DI SARRO. The show will officially open the international and national celebrations of 40 years from Luigi Di Sarro death. Guided tours with the curator can be booked in advance. (info@centroluigidisarro.it)

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In the forty years of the death of Luigi Di Sarro, the Center for Contemporary Art Research named after him celebrates his memory with a series of exhibitions dedicated to his work, starting with LA FOTOGRAFIA SPERIMENTALE DI LUIGI DI SARRO, curated by Carlotta Sylos Calò and focused on the photographic production from 1968 to 1976 and enriched by an in-depth study of drawing and sculpture.

Since the Sixties Luigi Di Sarro has worked with different techniques and languages: drawing, painting, graphics, sculpture and photography. The latter becomes, starting from the end of the decade, one of the elective means to develop themes already strongly linked to his work. According to an open approach, already applied to other techniques, photography becomes a way to observe reality, create new forms and points of view, even ‘playing’ with the photographic medium, both in the shooting phase and in the development and printing phase. In his research, in fact, the artist does not involve only the image but its constitutive process: sets up sets in his studio to make particular shots, and often, after printing in the darkroom, intervenes again, cutting out the prints, creating maquette and collage that then re-photographs. The leading actor of many of the images of the ample photographic corpus produced by Di Sarro between 1968 and 1976 is the same artist who often puts himself on stage to measure analytically the functioning of some phenomena such as movement, sign, color and light.

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the ARP DOCUMENTARY at CORTOLOVERE with a Site specific by VALENTINA COLELLA curated by EMANUELE MESCHINI

Opening 19 September 2017, h.16.30 – Chiesa di Santa Chiara, Lovere (BG) Italy.

 

A conversation about art, a two-voices comparison, sometimes intimate and sometimes ironic: this is the ARP DOC, which tells about the V Edition of the exchange art residencies promoted by Centro Di Sarro with the contribution of MAECI-Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and the collaboration of Everard Read/CIRCA Gallery in Cape Town, Ruth Prowse School of Art and Rainbow Media NPO. In the activities of ARP Italy / South Africa 2015-2017, 6 young people were involved: the two artists selected to participate in the residencies, two assistant curators who assisted them and two filmmakers who made the documentary: Angelica Farinelli, who filmed and organized the material, and Giorgio Cristiano, who edited the 25 minutes movie with tells, through the voices of Valentina Colella and Zwelethu Machepha, what is ARP.

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At the 20th edition of the short film International Festival of “shortLovere” (Lovere, BG), there is the Doc, but also THE POSSIBILITIES OF A FLIGHT, a site specific that tests, as an extra step of the path, Valentina Colella and Emanuele Meschini, who as assistant curator has followed the work of Machepa in Rome, concluding in the best way the dialogue between the participants in the project.
“ARP is not just a travel and training program, we have the ambition that it is an opportunity for human and professional growth, made up of the ability to compare and relate, to discover and consolidate one’s own creativity”, explains Alessandra Atti Di Sarro, ARP’s artistic director and vice-president of the Centro Di Sarro, who conceived it.

The exhibition will remain open throughout the duration of the Festival, from September 19 until September 23 at the following times: 4.30 – 8.30 pm at the Church of Santa Chiara, via S. Maria, Lovere, Bergamo. School visits by reservation only.

BIENNALE “ LE LATITUDINI DELL’ARTE”   2nd edition BUDAPEST

 

 

 

 

Mercoledì 9 agosto 2017 Inaugura a Budapest nella splendida cornice di Palazzo Vigado l’edizione ungherese delle Latitudini dell’Arte. La mostra nata dallo scambio con la Biennale Le Latitudini dell’arte. Ungheria e Italia del 2015 a Palazzo Ducale di Genova, è curata da Martà Simonffy e Virginia Monteverde con la critica d’arte Viana Conti e il critico ungherese Sulyok Miklós.
 Gli artisti italiani presenti in mostra sono trenta:

Connie Bellantonio, Isabel Consigliere, Giacomo Costa, Pier Giorgio De Pinto, Alessio Delfino, Luigi Di Sarro, Sabina Feroci, Armando Fettolini, Michelangelo Galliani, Lory Ginedumont, Gian Luca Groppi, Pina Inferrera, Luca Lischetti, Federica Marangoni, Giancarlo Marcali, Luisa Mazza, Virginia Monteverde, Silvio Monti, Antonio Pedretti, Alex Pinna, Davide Ragazzi, Elettra Ranno, Marco Nereo Rotelli, Enzo Rovella, Sergio Sarri, Tedman&Strand, Francesco Vieri, Marilena Vita, Christian Zanotto, Corrado Zeni.