In a second tour, we visited six more exhibitions of the autumn season in Bologna. Most of them are still ongoing. Although the variety of artists and techniques is comparable to the exhibitions of the first round, the presented shows are more minimalistic in the second part, self-evidently with exceptions.
Galleria de’ Foscherari: Mario Airò – Il pipistrello bianco
Casa Gallery Itinerante: Displacements/Spostamenti
Adiacenze: Giulio Zanet – La vita è un passatempo
AF arte contemporanea: Amedeo Martegani – a wormhole
Otto Gallery: Five Masterpieces from a Collection 1985-1995
Mario Airò: Il pipistrello bianco
Galleria de’ Foscherari
Via Castiglione 2B, Bologna
www.defoscherari.com
5 October – 7 December 2019
For the exhibition “Il pipistrello bianco”, (The white Bat), the installation artist Mario Airò follows the traces of the dongba, the priests of the Nakhi people in Southwest China. Their objective is to reach harmony between human beings and nature. Airò “translates” the dongba’s apotropaic rites with his own means to create harmonic installations in space. The result is a balanced atmosphere, where even a laser installation develops a calming meditative attraction.
Casa Gallery Itinerante
Museo della Resistenza – Istituto Storico Parri
Via San Isaia 20, Bologna
www.casagalleryitinerante.com
11 – 18 October 2019
In the splendid rooms of the Bolognese Museum of Resistance three artists of two different generations met. Nevertheless, they are related by a similar approach, which is not surprisingly, because Claudio Rosi was the teacher of Damiano Paroni and Gialuca Ferrari. None of the three installations are fixed in their dimensions and evolve continuously, since there are ongoing projects. Claudio Rosi transforms coloured sheets of paper into three-dimensional “Coni” (cones). On the contrary, Damiano Paroni works only with black paper, to form a crowd, reminding an invasion of birds. In the same room, Gialuca Ferrari installed his illuminated monitors, showing silhouettes of human heads. Amalgamated were both works by a sound installation.
Adiacenze
Vicolo Spirito Santo 1, Bologna
www.adiacenze.it
11 October – 19 November 2019
More colourful and possessive are Giulio Zanet’s installations at Adiacenze. The visitor doesn’t stand in front of the artwork, but plunge into it. Starting with some of his paintings, the artist added other materials to create an enormous patchwork, which covers the entire room. In contrast to the fast moving contemporary world of images, the beholder can take his/her time to contemplate and reflect on the materialisation of the conflict between violence and softness. Whereas in the second room downstairs, Zanet does not allow much time to regard. Although, there is only a single painting, an automatic interrupter extinguishes the light every then and now, so that the onlooker gets only a short impression of the image.
AF arte contemporanea
Via dei Bersaglieri 5/E, Bologna
www.af-artecontemporanea.it
12 October 2019 – 8 February 2020
Alike intense, even though more minimalistic is the installation “a wormhole” by Amedeo Martegani. By the modification of the entire exhibition space, it is like entering into a tunnel, where the visitor is not only surrounded by the wooden construction, but also by its scent. It feels as the worm in the wormhole might feel. Loitering through the passageway, the attentive observer can discover small drawings, which hide in the wood grain or could glance through a small hole into a closed side room.
Otto Gallery Arte Contemporanea
Via D’Azeglio 55, Bologna
www.otto-gallery.it
19 October 2019 – 10 January 2020
Coming from a prestigious private collection, the Otto Gallery presents five works assigned to the Scuola di San Lorenzo, a generation of artists working up from the late 1970s in an old bread factory in this proletarian quarter of Rome. With Gianni Dessì, Giuseppe Gallo, Nunzio, Piero Pizzi Cannella and Marco Tirelli, the Otto Gallery shows five representative creatives of the group. The paintings and sculptures reveal a certain neighbourhood to Arte Povera, even though the artists are from the next generation. Simultaneous to that glance to art history, it is also a look to the gallery’s history, which is interwoven with the five artists.
Spazio Testoni
Via D’Azelglio 50, Bologna
www.spaziotestoni.it
19 October – 25 November 2019
Likewise, Spazio Testoni regards to its own history, even though, the time span is not going back so far. It is a younger generation of female artists with different backgrounds, who developed their own visual vocabulary. The techniques are diverse like photography (Lea Golda Holterman), installation (Caroline Le Méhauté and Donatella Lombardo), painting and collage (Dellaclà, Melissa Provezza, Elisa Saggiomo and Caterina Sbrana) or mostly project based works (Maria Rebecca Ballestra).
