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”.

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.