Autumn Exhibitions in Bologna: From white to colourful

The current exhibitions for the season start are naturally various: by age and origin of the artists, techniques and intensions and depending on the type of gallery. Nevertheless, there are some formal or thematic links between some shows. At the end of this article, you’ll find a list of several Bolognese exhibitions, a lot with photos of the exhibition.

P420 invited the American painter Stephan Rosenthal, born in 1935, for his first solo show in the gallery. It is a retrospective of his two latest cycles of works, seemingly white monochromes. Only a closer view unveil accents in pastel shades or openings to anthracite coloured fields. The paintings invite to immerse in and to appreciate equilibrium of the compositions, which are all but not symmetric.

At the Galleria Stefano Forni are the works of the twenty years younger Italian Giorgio Bevignani on view. A big part are also monochromes, but the dominant colour is red. There are transparency studies in watercolour, which find their extension in the series “Silenzio Nudo” (Naked Silence). These oeuvres are superpositions of fine layers of pigmented silicone. The single covers are partly transparent, so that the images have a profound deep. Besides some sculptures and a reddish carpet also made of silicon, there is a huge accessible installation in the courtyard: a netlike tube in pink pastel shades, several meters high.

Apparatus 22 united the colour shades from Stephan Rosenthal and Giorgio Bevignani, even though their point of departure is very different. The Romanian artist collective, was founded in 2011 in Bucharest. Since 2015, they are working between Bucharest and Brussels. They have a highly philosophical approach. In 2016, in their exhibition “Several Laws, The Elastic Test”, they questioned about the human body as a battlefield of interferences by social norms and values, scientific concepts and enterprise dreams to accelerate consumption. Now back in the Gallleriapiù, their concerns are about the body of the future, as sequel. Once again, there are statements as laser inscriptions on leather, but the ground is white. Moreover, there are several sculptural installations of medical crutches, leather and other materials, sometimes accentuated with red textiles. The exhibition doesn’t question only about the future of the human body, but as well about the appearance of computers, which might change into more human forms.

In the exhibition “C’è macchia e macchia” (There are stains and stains) 13 students from the Bolognese Academy of Arts reflected as well on the human body. In this case, it was about the medical and social aspects of skin diseases and especially the Psoriasis. The Natalino Corazza Foundation offered a prize to young artists dealing with the subject and the gallery Ariete Contemporanea showed the finalists. Some of them approached the topic directly, by dealing with images of the diseased skin, others focussed on negative social effects, like isolation. They used different media to transport their message.

Somehow extra-terrestrial is the show “Work (within a Work)” at the gallery Enrico Astuni, although the English artist Steven Pippin, born in 1969, circuits around the 0° degree longitude and our geocentricity. The selection of works cover the creation period of the last 28 years. There are testimonies of performances, photography, sculpture, experimental film and engineering. One of the oldest works, the Geostationary TV (1996-98) is a rotating TV in a circular framework, displaying the earth. Also “Carbon copiers” (2004) and “Cannoned doppelgänger scanner” (2005) could not only attract technically interested people. The oeuvres and their installation in the spacious gallery, invite to pause and meditate.

Like the river Po by night are the pending meandering branches in the darkness of the basement of the gallery Adiacenze. It takes a little bit of time to find some orientation. Then, one realises that the connections between the branches are made of acrylic resin. Organic and inorganic materials establish a relationship to stabilise a fragile structure to conquer the space. Moreover, if this wouldn’t be enough, the installation “Fluire” (to flow) on the ground floor exceeds the show room and reaches through the window. Even though there would have been enough space inside. For the art critic Davide Da Pieve, the exhibition “Superfici Iniziale” (Initial Surfaces) di Flavio Pacino refers, inter alia, to an anthropocentrism that we can’t escape from, since it is not possible to reduce history only to human facts. Humans are not only changing events, but also the environment, the nature.

Esodo (Exodus) at the Spazio Testoni is also about escapes. The artist-duo Antonello Ghezzi works about an inner flight, the desire to escape the reality and the human solitude. By mirrors like in the installation “Kind of blue” and seemingly open windows (Nuvole/Clouds), they invite to flee reality into a better dream world, at least for an instant. Whereas Giovanni de Gara’s maps as collages refer to the real exodus of African refugees towards Europe. In “Pangea” he shows the divergent super-continent to illustrate that originally there were no borders between the continents. The landmasses in light blue water are made from golden thermal blankets, which are often the first shelter for refugees reaching Europe. With that, Giovanni also refers to his current installation project at church portals “Eldorato”. The name of the project is a distortion of the unreachable Eldorado.

Likewise the Eldorado as a non-existing world, is the expression of the paintings by the Irish painter Damien Meade. Even though, the depicted objects seem to be familiar, they have no real existence. Are some of them portraits? But of whom? Heads, seemingly made of clay are pending over something that might be neck and shoulders or perhaps a vase. The colours are not realistic; however, the materiality is captivating. This is even more true in the paintings, which are more abstract. They are suggesting a three-dimensionality, which results as illusion when approaching.