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Clelia
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Rome is a fantastic city because there are many museums and places to visit. But for 20th century art lovers like me, a stop not to be missed is #GNAM. In fact, arriving from the gardens of Villa Borghese, he was immediately captured by the staircase with lions by Davide Rivalta. This is an installation born on the occasion of the gallery's rearrangement in 2016. It is not about attacking animals but resting. it is as if they had chosen the museum staircase as their home, they are relaxed in the sun. Thus they accompany the visitor in the entrance to the museum together with the writing "Time is out of joint", which is a statement from Shakespeare's Hamlet and from 2016 highlights the desire to create a new course in art history.
The works preserved inside are mostly related to the history of Italian art of the 1900s. In fact, the collection was born in the mid-nineteenth century and when Rome recently became capital.
Since 2016, with this new layout, the choice has been to not necessarily follow a chronological order. This choice is accompanied by that of exhibiting fewer works but of enhancing them a lot. There are works that tell some of the most important movements of art such as futurism in Italy until the late twentieth century. The collection is rich so I decided to tell you about the 5 works that I think are unmissable at the National Gallery of Modern Art.
The first is Boccioni's Antigrazioso from 1912. Famous for being one of the most important artists of Italian futurism, Boccioni traveled extensively from Calabria to Rome, Paris, Milan and Venice before tackling the First World War. He thus developed many friendships but above all a vision of his own movement, beauty in art and sculpture.
Exposed a stone's throw from Boccioni's sculpture, there is another unmissable piece of the #museum: Marcel Duchamp's Bottle Drainer from 1914. Being a ready-made by the most talked about artist of the 1900s, the sculpture is exactly what it seems: one bottle rack.
The aim of the work is to present an object of everyday life and challenge the traditional concept of art and aesthetics. His works are considered one of the strongest provocations in the whole history of art. And for this reason they have significantly revolutionized it, giving space to the conceptual already in 1910 and freeing the artist from the exclusive figure of a master only by great technical skills.
For the next work, it is necessary to make a leap forward in time of almost 40 years. The big sack of 1952 is a particular work because it is one of the first made in those years. Burri had returned a few years after his imprisonment in America to a prison camp in Texas. And the bags, like his other works, are characterized by the work on the raw material.
And the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome could not miss the works of one of the most significant Roman artists for the painting of the '900: Giuseppe Capogrossi.
Surface 290 from 1958 is characterized by one of the distinctive signs of Capogrossi: the black mark on a white background which changes color in other works but which has become its brand over time. Capogrossi had become famous as an exponent of the Roman School before the Second World War, but almost immediately afterwards his works were transformed becoming abstract and characterized by these symbols on the canvas.
And finally a last unmissable work in my opinion is Z-44 from 1960 by Jannis Kounellis, one of the main protagonists of Germano Celant's # artepovera. It falls fully into what will be the characteristics of poor art a few years later: the choice of materials, the apparent simplicity of the realization and the strength of the concept in the work.
It is always worth returning to the National Gallery because interesting temporary exhibitions are organized related to artists of the '900 or contemporary. When I went the last time the Monumentum exhibition was in progress with works by Robert Morris.
Morris was one of the founders of American minimalism in art in the 1960s. But he didn't just create minimal works and the intent of the exhibition was to demonstrate it. For me it was an interesting starting point to discover new works by an artist that in the past I associated only with minimalism and geometry.
8 сен 2024
