Surprise | Aldo Mondino
from 10 February 2015 to 07 April 2015
Torino
Surprise. ALDO MONDINO alla GAM di Torino
Aldo Mondino is the focus of the first event in the 2015 edition of ‘Surprise’ at the GAM in Turin, an exhibition project dedicated to specific aspects of Turin’s artistic scene in the 1960s and 1970s. The focus shifts from time to time to works, traces of exhibition itineraries, unpublished projects and references to non-artistic contexts; heterogeneous fragments united by a sense of wonder and amazement and by the intensification of vital energies typical of those years.
This third series of events is curated by Maria Teresa Roberto, lecturer in Contemporary Art History at the Accademia Albertina in Turin, and Gregorio Mazzonis, curator at the GAM. The exhibition hall on the second floor of the museum is dedicated to the project.
After spending time in Paris from 1959 to 1960, where he attended the École du Louvre and William Heyter’s engraving courses, Aldo Mondino made his debut in Turin in 1963 with a solo exhibition at the Il Punto gallery, then directed by Gian Enzo Sperone. On this occasion, he presented his new works, the Anatomical Tables, metaphors for contemporary society depicted through the organs of the human body. Sole and Immersore, both created in 1967 and featured in the exhibition at the GAM, represent an anomaly within his artistic output, which during those years was focused on playfulness and humour.
The arrival of Pop Art in Italy, which found in Gian Enzo Sperone one of its most important promoters, and its consecration in the exhibition at the 1964 Venice Biennale, constitutes a fundamental precedent for all artistic research in the years to come. Mondino, too, appropriates certain principles, such as the idea of transcending the boundaries of painting through the use of materials found in our everyday environment, in this case wood and incandescent light bulbs.
Whilst Immersore relates, as Riccardo Passoni noted, more to the New Dada themes being discussed in those very years, Sole uses the materials of illuminated signs to interpret a theme dear to landscape painting—the dawn—on which, incidentally, the work of one of the masters of Pop Art, Roy Lichtenstein, focused between 1963 and 1964: Sperone dedicated the opening exhibition of his gallery to him.
The two works share, in addition to the materials used, a fixed measurement that guides their installation on the wall—160 centimetres from the floor—indicated by the artist with a label from the Stein Gallery on the reverse of Immersore. This imaginary line, which runs horizontally across the work, defines the point below which the light bulbs must remain off and corresponds both to the measurement theorised by Masaccio as the fixed height of the human eye and to the mark left by the waters of the Arno on certain masterpieces of Florentine art, which impressed Mondino to such an extent that it prompted him to create a series of works between the end of ’66 and 1967. Among these works, it is worth mentioning the intervention at the exhibition Con temp l’azione (Stein, Sperone and Il Punto galleries, Turin 1967), during which the artist connected the exhibition venues by stretching a red thread across the city at a height of 160 centimetres above the ground.
Surprise. ALDO MONDINO
Curated by Maria Teresa Roberto and Gregorio Mazzonis
GAM Turin, Via Magenta 31, 10128 Turin
from 10 February to 7 April 2015
Opening: 10 February, 6.30 pm
This third series of events is curated by Maria Teresa Roberto, lecturer in Contemporary Art History at the Accademia Albertina in Turin, and Gregorio Mazzonis, curator at the GAM. The exhibition hall on the second floor of the museum is dedicated to the project.
After spending time in Paris from 1959 to 1960, where he attended the École du Louvre and William Heyter’s engraving courses, Aldo Mondino made his debut in Turin in 1963 with a solo exhibition at the Il Punto gallery, then directed by Gian Enzo Sperone. On this occasion, he presented his new works, the Anatomical Tables, metaphors for contemporary society depicted through the organs of the human body. Sole and Immersore, both created in 1967 and featured in the exhibition at the GAM, represent an anomaly within his artistic output, which during those years was focused on playfulness and humour.
The arrival of Pop Art in Italy, which found in Gian Enzo Sperone one of its most important promoters, and its consecration in the exhibition at the 1964 Venice Biennale, constitutes a fundamental precedent for all artistic research in the years to come. Mondino, too, appropriates certain principles, such as the idea of transcending the boundaries of painting through the use of materials found in our everyday environment, in this case wood and incandescent light bulbs.
Whilst Immersore relates, as Riccardo Passoni noted, more to the New Dada themes being discussed in those very years, Sole uses the materials of illuminated signs to interpret a theme dear to landscape painting—the dawn—on which, incidentally, the work of one of the masters of Pop Art, Roy Lichtenstein, focused between 1963 and 1964: Sperone dedicated the opening exhibition of his gallery to him.
The two works share, in addition to the materials used, a fixed measurement that guides their installation on the wall—160 centimetres from the floor—indicated by the artist with a label from the Stein Gallery on the reverse of Immersore. This imaginary line, which runs horizontally across the work, defines the point below which the light bulbs must remain off and corresponds both to the measurement theorised by Masaccio as the fixed height of the human eye and to the mark left by the waters of the Arno on certain masterpieces of Florentine art, which impressed Mondino to such an extent that it prompted him to create a series of works between the end of ’66 and 1967. Among these works, it is worth mentioning the intervention at the exhibition Con temp l’azione (Stein, Sperone and Il Punto galleries, Turin 1967), during which the artist connected the exhibition venues by stretching a red thread across the city at a height of 160 centimetres above the ground.
Surprise. ALDO MONDINO
Curated by Maria Teresa Roberto and Gregorio Mazzonis
GAM Turin, Via Magenta 31, 10128 Turin
from 10 February to 7 April 2015
Opening: 10 February, 6.30 pm
Surprise. ALDO MONDINO alla GAM di Torino
Immersore, 1967
Opere correlate
Nessuna opera correlata trovata