MOSTRE

Opening: Tuesday December 1st  2009

Exhibition period: from  1st December 2009 till 15th February 2010

Opening hours: Tuesday – Saturday from 10  am to 1 pm and from 4  to 8 pm

With Phillip King and David Tucker double exhibition in 1966 till the last one dedicated to Richard Smith in 1978, Beatrice Monti, Galleria dell'Ariete has dedicated  very many exhibitions to the new abstract art in England.

At the time British young generation had a good response also in Italy. In 1966  four  painters Bernard and Harold Cohen, Robyn Denny, Richard Smith, and the sculptor Anthony Caro, selected by David Thompson  represented England in the British Pavillion of Venice Biennale.

Galleria Milano that  in the Sixties and early Seventies  organized various shows to British Pop Art (1966 "London under Forty", 1968 Allen Jones, 1970 Colin Self, 1973 Peter Phillips), presents now, in collaboration with Beatrice Monti a selection of works of seven prominent artists of the period.

David Thompson wrote in the introduction of  the British Pavilion at Venice Biennale: "It has become rapidly apparent in the last few years that an entirely new spirit has entered into both British painting and British sculpture. It could be claimed that at no period since the war there has been a generation of British painters less regional in its outlook, yet more assured in its independence, than that which is now in its mid-thirties…It is a generation which has had the confidence to break with its own past, to meet what threatened at one time to be the overwhelming challenge of the new painting from the United States, and to emerge with a strength and character of its own."

In those years in London experimentations of various kinds, but well characterized by their typicality, were under way.

And James Faure Walker writes in the present show’s catalogue introduction: "The talk was about taking sculpture and painting to a new place. A sculpture could be anything. A painting could be triangular or have a zigzag contour. The smells were different: no longer turpentine, but acrylic medium, spray-guns, cotton duck, and spools of masking tape (used for those ’hard’ edges) snagging on the studio against it.” 

The complex, layered, woven paintings of the British would reveal their subtleties little by little. But this thread of abstract painting was never interrupted. Bernard Cohen’s later paintings left viewers astounded - rhapsodic patterns and electrifying dissonances. They are among the great achievements of modern painting. In Harold Cohen’s sixties paintings, you find the codes and the fragmented diagrams that lead directly to his computer works. In California he developed Aaron, his software alter ego, which incorporates his painterly sensibility. The lush organic-seeming foliage has the flavour of authentic painting, though it has been imagined by a machine He is a true pioneer, recognized throughout the world for opening the door onto a new age. John Hoyland’s early work has signs of the restlessness, the energy, the riskiness, the belligerence, the fabulous tropical palette of his latest work.

The creativity of that period came from such confrontations – the lively arguments at the weekly ‘Sculpture Forums’ at St Martins. It was never doctrinaire at that time. Lateral thinking, eccentricity, oddity, were all respected. Flanagan went to draw at Regents Park zoo, and when he turned ‘figurative’ with his hares this was another move sideways – like his conversation that stopped mid-sentence, leaving you hanging in the air. In his works and in his essays Tucker keeps investigating on sculpture's language, and Richard Smith has had in recent times many architectural commitments.

In March 2010 Austin Desmond, London will take over this show. A catalogue in English and Italian with several colour reproductions will be available in both galleries.

 

Opening: Friday September 18th, 2009 6.30 pm
For the season's opening of Start the gallery will be open on Saturday September 19th, 2009 from 12 am to 9 pm and on Sunday 20th, 2009  from 12 am to 7 pm
Exhibition period: from Saturday September 19th, 2009 to Saturday November 14th, 2009
Opening hours:  from Tuesday to Saturday 10.00 am to 1.00 pm and  from 4.00 pm to 8.00 pm

Davide Mosconi starts producing triptychs in 1980 when Polaroid offers him to use the new large format camera (61x51 cm).
In those years his father dies and Mosconi stops working. He spends most of the time in his father's library, where he finds several illustrated medical manuals. He is struck by coincidences. A medical photograph reminds him of an image by Jacques André Boiffard, a surrealist photographer.
He starts researching and places side by side two photos by different authors, who without being aware take similar shots. To the coincidence of the two images found he adds a third image, his own one.
"This third image once again stressed that the crucial thing in photography has nothing to do with an act of representation, and even less with the object that finds itself represented: the crucial feature of photography is the form or figure that the viewer perceives and recognizes, imbuing it with meaning or a range of meanings". Pool Andries, Davide Mosconi, Edizioni Charta 1997.
"In morte del padre", is the very first triptych realized with Polaroid camera and has never been exhibited before.
"My work is an ongoing investigation of the concepts of simultaneity and randomness. My earlier triptych series was based on the discovery that different photographers at different times throughout the history of the medium had photographed more or less the same thing in more or less the same way. In this earlier series, I rephotographed two similar images by different photographers and combined them with a third image created by me in the studio. In the most recent series presented herein, titled "Drawing Air", I am concerned with the concept of random chance. To produce each diptych, I have made only three exposures. The first is a test.
In the second and third exposures, the objects are thrown and photographed as they arrange themselves into patterns in mid·air. In this way I am also attempting to make visible the invisible and draw the air". Davide Mosconi


Davide Mosconi (Milano 1941-2002) studies piano and musical composition at Conservatorio.
After his diploma Mosconi moves to London and studies photography at the Royal College of Printing.
1963 works in New York as assistant to Richard Avedon and Hiro.
1967 back in Milano first solo show Il sogno di Davide  at Galleria Il Diaframma.
1968 creates “Studio X” a photographic studio. He realizes advertising campaigns, reportages, and fashion photo services, working at the same time in music and video art.
1972 participates to the show “The New Domestic Landscape” at MOMA, NY with a short “Something to believe in”.
1974 participates to "Arte in Fotomedia", curated by Daniela Palazzoli.
1986 - 1997 his main projects are the tryptichs of Prague (still lives) and the series Day skies e Night skies, exhibited in Italy, Europe and in the US in private galleries and museums.
2001 and 2003 participates to the Venice Biennale.
His most recent projects were Disegnare l’aria and Polveri inspired by and dedicated to Bruno Munari.
His last work, Autoritratti bucati, have been exhibited at Galleria San Fedele in 2003.

Opening: Wednesday May 6th, 2009 at 6.30 pm
Exhibition period: May 7th - July 20th 2009
Gallery opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday from 10.00 am to 1.00 pm and from 4.00 pm to 8.00 pm
From June 15 th the Gallery will be closed on Saturday afternoon

Pierpaolo Lista is just over thirty, lives and works in Paestum. His paintings have been exhibited in solo shows in Pavia (2003) and in Rome (2006 and 2007) His more recent photographic work has been exhibited for the first time in 2008 in Salerno.
Galleria Milano will exhibit both media: photographs as well as paintings.
Lista paints with enamel on the reverse of Visarm glass plates, having always the same dimension (100 x 120 cm.) Images represent inconsistent profiles of common objects (a motorbike, a piano, a watch, knives, spectacles laying abandoned on a table etc.); simulacrums of everybody's daily life which, reduced to minimal lines, become, let's say, a sort of memory of reality.
"Seeing Pierpalo Lista's works was like opening a box of souvenirs: images that belong to us, that have a lot to say, but have also told us a lot. It is not by chance that the absolute absence of human beings enables us to take possession of them." (Mariangela Calisti in "Cose" text for the catalogne of Galleria, Mares Pavia)
Lista's photographic work has moreover a scenic (theatrical) ambivalence: assembling pieces of paper, of hardboard and looms the artist creates environments, empty rooms, but also objects of our daily life  built with iron threads, nails, paint;  their shadow is created by the light or drawn on water coloured background. These assemblages exist just in order to be photographed.
"The photographic technique is from the very beginning a simple and swift way to create an image that is in itself alter ego and deuteragonist of figurations already pertaining to Lista's pictorial production. Is to say in other words, the "excarnation" performed upon an objective element – even the simplest – transformed by way of a fine craft and conscious alteration, in a sort of phantasmatic vision which, although preserving the stigmata of reality, succeeds in transforming it in, what I could define, its equivalent memory. (Gillo Dorfles: The conceptual photography of Pierpaolo Lista – in Teatri segreti, Salerno 2008)

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Opening: Wednesday  November 26, 2008 at  6:30 p.m.
Exhibition period: Thursday  November 27, 2008 - Saturday  January 24, 2009
Gallery opening hours: Tuesday till Saturday from 10 am to 1 pm and from 4 till 8 pm

"+ 1" means that 51 years have elapsed  since Sandro Somaré's  works were exhibited for the first time at Galleria Selecta in Rome. During the years Somaré had several solo shows in Italy and in Europe (mainly France and Belgium) both in public institutions and private galleries. In Milano among others at Galleria dell'Ariete, Galleria del Naviglio, Galleria Gianferrari, Galleria San Carlo and most recently (2006) with his brother Guido at "La Rotonda della Besana".
Paintings, drawings, gouaches, watercolours and also three dimensional "Teatrini" or boxes of different periods, now exhibited at Galleria Milano trace a sort of autobiography.
"As a matter of fact his work on the whole forms a sort of autobiography in which variations of the same subject or changes of an event are recorded  in great details on a intangible dimension of time" (Luigi Carluccio, Turin Galleria Minima, 1968).
Until 1964 abstract forms break out  minutely painted on canvas in a reflection of light often crystallized in an ice cold cube.  During the years space in the artist’s works become more defined.
Figures become more objective in a hypnotic light and architectural elements more detailed.
Indoor spaces as well as the cool glass doors of old Milanese palace hallways recreate the same sensation of silence and withdrawal we may find in his landscapes.
"Somaré uses  delicate, fine tonalities of  colour permeated with light, laid  accurately (minutely), stroke after stroke, not per contrasts but  filtered, to stir up calm and suspended atmospheres,  where spaces are barely touched by a solitary mystery" ( Pierluigi Tassi, Milano, Galleria Gianferrari, 1982).
Somaré’s three dimensional works: boxes, theatre stages, models of art galleries as well as the most recent televisions are only apparently different from his pictorial works, actually they are always images referred to personal experiences: an unlikely stage in which the figures seem to be waiting
for an event that may occur.
Among other critics and art historians: Luigi Carluccio, Raffaele Carrieri, Eduard Glissant, Luigi Lambertini, Nicoletta Pallini, Osvaldo Patani, Franco Russoli, Emilio Tadini, Pierluigi Tassi, Marco Valsecchi, Guido Vergani and Patrick Waldberg have written about Somaré’s work.