BEYOND THE FORM

Beyond the Form is an exhibition that leads to dialogue between the aesthetic itineraries of six Italian artists, of international fame, Mimmo Rotella, Tano Festa, Mario Schifano, Pietro Finelli, Luca Coser, Paolo Manazza, according to a common thread capable of linking their poetics with a matrix that, from the beginning of the 1900s to the present, has outlined a figuration generated by a tension towards the abandonment of the academic form, of mimesis, in favour of an ‘exforma’, a pictorial grammar epiphany of inner fluctuations, far from classicism and bearer, indeed , of a visionary substrate, limbic and enigmatic, lyrically different but equally evocative. Beyond the Form, therefore, it intends not to merely compare the six personalities, but, through a syncopated dialogue between the works of each one, to start a relational process, in which the Art proposes itself as a relational and ontological medium, able to overcome the limits of perception, gap for an imaginative elsewhere.

THE ARTISTS

Mimmo Rotella (1918 - 2006), artist and key figure of the Nouveau Réalisme and Pop Art, abandons the pictorial figuration discovering the value of the advertising poster as a vehicle of artistic expression, through the décollage, which he combined the assemblage and readymade. He combined these languages with increasingly complex and different elaborations, including photographic ones, capable of undermining the concept of conventional figuration.

Tano Festa (1938 – 1988), painter and photographer, exponent of the School of Piazza del Popolo, Italian pop avant-garde, he proposed a new dada language in an extraordinarily eccentric and conceptual way, until he found in painting the vehicle of a reinterpretation of the past in a geometric and refined key.

Mario Schifano (1934 – 1998), artist, painter, director, protagonist of Pop Art with the names already mentioned, he moved between the rewriting of the landscape and works in which, allusively, he brought symbols and letters, easily recognizable, on the canvas, by dissolving the colour, tearing the support or mélange of photos on "emulsified canvas". Fundamental was the mixture of the pictorial medium with the linguistic one, in the desire to overcome the past and the previous schemes.

Pietro Finelli (1957), artist and curator, after a past of experimentation on the subject, today investigates painting through an interesting dynamic that starts from urban visions and images of American noir cinema of the '40s and' 50s, according to a spatial encroachment and poetic, where the detail is the protagonist.

Luca Coser (1965), artist and professor at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, perceives the reality of artistic fiction as a guideline, in this logic his work is justified as a kind of interior painting, where architecture is given precisely by the products of art, being them literature, painting, cinema, through a process of art for art, art on art.

Paolo Manazza (1959), artist and art expert, after having studied ancient painting and the informal results of the New York and European school of the Fifties, today he experiments with chromatic superimpositions in a neoinformal painting that combines the power of gestures with the vibrations of color.

AZZURRA IMMEDIATO

Historian, art critic and curator, she was born in Benevento and lives in Bologna where she graduated in History of Architecture and Art at DAMS and subsequently obtained a Master's Degree in History of Medieval and Modern Art, at the Alma Mater Studiorum. She comes to the contemporary after years of work in HR, collaborating with important online magazines including ArtsLife, Photolux Magazine, Il Denaro, Ottica Contemporanea, Rivista Segno, Senza Filtro and Il Sannio Quotidiano, writing about art, photography, design, video art. She has followed and follows several emerging and non-emerging artists, for several years she has been cooperating with some galleries as a critic, in particular in the work of designing, writing and editing catalogs and art books, curating for monographic and collective exhibitions; then she works on other kinds of artistic installations and projects. Her passion for photography allows her to tend towards the search for new languages ​​and in recent years, in addition to her affection, she has curated and directed some exhibitions in collaboration with Italian and foreign photographers, in national museums or festivals, together with projects of university sponsored charity and art therapy. The last few years have been marked by the curatorship of some important personal exhibitions in Southern Italy and others in Emilia Romagna; In 2018 she started an important collaboration with photographer Paolo Verzone for the Photolux Festival in Lucca, focused on the aesthetics of the image. Since 2018 she has been the artistic director of the Photography Section of the VinArte festival and creator, with Massimo Mattioli, of the Imago Murgantia project. Part of her work also concerns video art and the theory of multimedia languages. She is also among the first signatories of the 'Art Thinking Manifesto' and Senior Art Curator for Arteprima Progetti; assigns culture a central role in human existence and curiosity for the world a value that should never be forgotten. She is a member of the Scientific Board of the 'IAR, International Artist Residency' project, conceived by Francesco Ciotola and Raffaele Loffredo, focused on video art. In addition, she embarked on a collaboration with the Jaumann Studio, combining the world of art with that of law and intellectual property.