“calamita cosmica,” an enormous skeleton by gino de dominicis

“Calamita Cosmica,” Gino De Dominicis, 1989, Foligno, Italy

Gino De Dominicis (1947-1998) created this giant skeleton sculpture in 1989, nine years before his own death. The Calamita Cosmica, or Cosmic Magnet, was first exhibited in 1990 and subsequently traveled around Europe for many years before making its final resting place in the former church of the Santissima Trinità in Annunziata in Foligno.

The structure, built between 1760 and 1775, and designed by Carlo Murena was actually never completed due to the architect’s death and remained incomplete until the 1997 earthquake that hit Umbria and the unused building was taken over by the city and an accurate rehab was done with subtle and contrasting modern steel details. It now acts as the second location of the contemporary art museum of Foligno, the Centro Italiano Arte Contemporanea (CIAC), inaugurated in 2009 and funded by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio of Foligno who acquired the piece shortly after the artist’s death.

This 24 meter long anatomically correct skeleton, except for its oversized and pointy nasal bone, is housed perfectly in the ex-church, where it can be accessed from the ground floor as well as be viewed from the upper floor balcony. Its almost as if the structure was made for the sculpture and it just fits perfectly into the space which makes its monumental scale even more impressive and its stillness spiritual.

The large skull echoes the vaulted ceiling shape and the ocular hole in the main dome is not unlike an eye socket, where one’s soul could escape into the atmosphere. De Dominicis frequently questioned death and the possibility of other beings existing in our world, hinted by recurring imagery of the alien-like nose and the golden rod resting on the middle finger, suggesting magnetism and cosmic energy. Strangely enough, the mysterious artist lived a low-brow lifestyle and did much of his work in secret. He preferred to avoid the press and even shunned photo-documentation of his work. It seems ironic then, that he would make such a large and lasting statement with the Calamita Cosmica.

The present context of the sculpture can be appreciated even after having traveled from Centre National d’Art Contemporain in Grenoble, France (1990) to the courtyard of the Palace of Capodimonte, Naples (1996). It was on display at the Mole Vanvitelliana, Ancona (2005), and was then moved to the Piazetta Reale in Milan (2007). Shortly there after, it appeared in the courtyard of the Palace of Versailles, and at MACI’s Grand Hornu in Brussels (2008). It then made an appearance at the opening of the MAXXI in Rome (2010) before finally settling in Foligno, the Calamita Cosmica‘s final resting place.

“Calamita Cosmica,” Gino De Dominicis, 1989 (Foligno) Photo: N. Muirhead

Calamita Cosmica di Gino De Dominicis

Santissima Trinità in Annunziata - Foligno (Umbria), Italy

Hours: Friday, Saturday, and Sunday 10am-1pm and 3:30pm-7pm

Free admission

For more information on the Centro Italiano Arte Contemporanea, see the post about the Julian Schnabel exhibition at CIAC.

julian schnabel at the centro italiano arte contemporanea through june 23

Julian Schnabel @ Centro Italiano Arte Contemporanea, Foligno

Who would have expected to find a [free] exhibition of 14 major works by Julian Schnabel, some of them never shown before in Italy, in Foligno, a small city in Umbria? In fact, since 2009 (after 9 years of development), the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Foligno has founded the Centro Italiano Arte Contemporanea – an impressive art space, contemporary is its exhibitions as well as its architecture.

Julian Schnabel: “Pino Pascali,” 1985, oil on wooden panels, 277×370 cm

Schnabel (b. 1951), one of the most famous artists known on the international scene for both his painting and his cinematography, lives and works in New York. For many years, he resided in Texas and received his BFA from the University of Houston and soon moved to NYC where he began showing his work at the Holly Soloman Gallery, and in 1979 had two solo exhibitions at the Mary Boone Gallery, before showing with Leo Castelli. The artist traveled Europe and Italy, and in 1980, participated in the Venice Biennale where he met Francesco Clemente, Anselm Kiefer, and Georg Baselitz.

Julian Schnabel: “The Conversion of St. Paolo Malfi,” 1995, oil, resin, fabric, and print on canvas, 274,3×243,8 cm

His work of the 1980s is considered Neo-expressionist, partially swayed by the Italian Transvanguardia and has been celebrated as “a return to painting” by many critics. Schnabel has also been influenced by works of Antonio Gaudi, Joseph Beuys, and friend, Cy Twombly. His painting became expressionist in nature while incorporating found objects and materials and was seen as a reaction against Minimalism and Conceptualism that he shared with other painters of the same genre such as David Salle, Eric Fischl, and Sigmar Polke. His work is included in major international museum collections in the MoMA, Met, Whitney, MOCA, Reina Sofia, Tate Modern, Georges Pompidou, and the Guggenheim in Bilbao.

Schnabel always makes big bold statements, in his artwork and his personality, and has not always been loved by the critical art world. But one cannot argue that his works are powerful in scale and passionate in expression with a common rough texture and manipulation of materials. He creates an eclectic language in revealing the human condition and memory in painting, as well as in his photography and films.

Julian Schnabel: “Mi vida es una cumbre de mentiras,” 1992, oil on cloth, 275×244 cm

In 1995, he created a film about his friend Jean Michel Basquiat, honoring the painter after his young and tragic death in 1988. In 1999 he directed Before Night Falls on the life of the sculptor Cuban exile Reinaldo Arenas, who in 2000 won the Grand Jury Prize and the Volpi Cup for Best Actor, Javier Bardem, at the Venice Film Festival. In 2007 he made his third film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on the novel by Jean Dominique Bauby, which won the award for Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival. The 64th edition of the International Venice Film Festival is part of the Commission of Venice Movie Stars Photography Award.

In Italy, 1996, he had a major retrospective at the Gallery of Modern Art of Bologna, and in 2004 at the Galleria Cardi & Co in Milan, and in 2007 he had two major solo exhibitions in Rome and Milan, where he showed up at the opening press conference in silk pajamas, which has become his signature style. Recently, the artist had a solo exhibition in the Los Angeles at the Gagosian Gallery.

The exhibition at the CIAC is curated and presented in a small catalog by Italo Tomassoni. On display are 14 large-scale works that exemplify Schanbel’s work from 1985 to 2008. Eight of the works belong to the gallerist Gian Enzo Sperone, while the other six belong to a private Milanese collector. One of these paintings is JMB, 1988, oil and gesso on military cloth, 487×487 cm, created just after Basquiat’s suicide.

Julian Schnabel: “JMB” (1988), and “Lola” (1989)

The museum isn’t super easy to find and I did not notice any posters or adverts about the exhibition around town, but Foligno merits a visit for its contemporary art also found in 2 other locations coming up in future posts, that are actually churches: Chiesa della Santissima Trinità and the Chiesa di San Paolo Apostolo.

Julian Schnabel

April 20 – June 23, 2013

Centro Italiano Arte Contemporanea
Via del Campanile, 13 – Foligno (PG), Italy
info@centroitalianoartecontemporanea.it
T (+39) 0742 357035

Hours: Friday, Saturday, and Sunday 10am-1pm and 3:30-7pm

How to get to the CIAC

“embodiments: medicine, metaphor, metaphysics” at la specola

Janice Gordon is a New York City artist working in various media, including sculpture, collage, assemblage and installation. Through the end of the month, her exhibition entitled Embodiments: Medice, Metaphor, Metaphysics can be seen while visiting Florence’s Museum of Natural History Department of Zoology, “La Specola, ” founded in 1775 and the oldest scientific museum in Europe. It boasts the largest collection of anatomical waxworks in the world, manufactured between 1770 and 1850 and over 3.500.000 animals, of which only 5.000 are in view to the public. The anatomic models once used to educate medical students inspired this artist’s body of work.

Gordon gives new life and context to found objects that she collects and various natural materials used in her work, creating fragile surface layers as well as conceptual ideas related to these materials and to her experience. Found objects bring along their own history and unknown stories. With genetic heart desease in her family, Gordon herself had heart failure which prompted her creative efforts to focus research of the heart itself, to better understand its anatomy and physiology. In her series Matters of the Heart, she is combining art with science, the physical with the sentimental, and the internal with the external. Through her research, she has had collaborative support from cardiologists giving her the opportunity to observe medical procedures, and to incorporate biomedical supplies in her constructions. Each piece is a delicate creation, poetically constructed representations of unique hearts using both organic materials along with artificial elements creating visceral and elegant metaphorical forms.

In the Torsos and Amulets series, the artist cast her own torso and covered the form with thin layers of Japanese paper embedded with mica fragments. Each torso, which could potentially be a protective breast plate, if it weren’t for its delicate material nature, is adorned with an amulet which, according to ancient beliefs, held the power to heal and protect. Gordon’s amulets, however, are more like apocalyptic jewels assembled with salvaged technical parts, discarded watch faces and movements, electrical devices, and biomedical bits that might give a false impression of the power of science and technology to protect us, at least in a spiritual way. These pieces deal with interior and exterior self-protection and how those two dimensions can reverse and mirror each other in their translucency.

 

In the beautifully rich collages of the Materia Medica/Metafisica series, Gordon constructs “portraits” using images from antique illustrated books and original 17th century materia medica manuscripts with descriptions of healing ingredients and recipes. She has used beeswax containing virgin wax from a Benedictine Monastery apiary near Parma. The metaphysical component lies in the mystery of the mind and spirit, not easily defined on paper.

 

First Aid Collectibles are small, altered first aid cards produced in 1913 as advertisements for a cigarette company. The images showed details of bandaged wounds and described how to make the bandages. Using these “trading cards” as a base, Gordon retains the bandages and builds upon the surface with her own collaged elements. They are presented in old wooden drawers covered in glass as if they were pulled out of a specimen cabinet.

Each of these series exhibited truly captivated me with their delicate and intimate nature. Examining the forms, layers and materials, one can strongly sense the narrative discovery made by the artist. The heart is a complicated organ, both in its mechanics as well as in its symbology of the human body and mind. The context of the exhibition and its display are also quite fitting. If you get a chance to see this exhibit, its well worth the entrance fee, plus you get to walk through the amazing exhibit rooms of the entire museum.

Embodiments: Medicine, Metaphor, Metaphysics

Through January 31, 2013

The Museum of Natural History of the University of Florence
Department of Zoology “La Specola”
Via Romana, 17
50125 Florence, Italy

Ticket: 6 euro

zeit = time: have a moment to spare at munich airport?

I recently passed through the Munich Airport where I happened across a small exhibit about time installed in one of the terminals. It was the perfect way for me to pass some time, reading about the history of time itself. Airport exhibits are tactfully placed and potentially visited by droves of people traveling through, waiting for their next flight. Here are some of the interesting objects displayed and information taken directly from selective wall texts:

“dear giotto” interview with artist deborah dancy

Deborah Dancy @ SACI

Dear Giotto is an exhibition of gouache on paper by Deborah Dancy currently at the SACI Gallery at Studio Art Centers International in via Sant’Antonino 11, Florence.

Her works seek to examine the tension between reality and the imagined. Dear Giotto is a series of works on paper created during this autumn while living in Florence. The title is homage to this artist across time and history and is a meditation on abstracting color, memory and stillness.

William Gass in his book On Being Blue, A Philosophical Inquiry writes, “It is the sky’s pale deep endlessness, sometimes so intense at noon the brightness flakes like a fresco. Then at dusk, it is the way the color sinks among us, not like dew but settling dust …”

Deborah Dancy echoes these impressions in contemplating her creation of these works: “Colors still vibrant in ancient frescoes  imagined scaffolding that soared to staggering heights holding both artist and assistant; glimpses of wedges of color between buildings lit by the setting sun as I walk the city and the shimmering greens of distant cypress trees on the surrounding hillside, are also echoed in this series. The weight of history and the architecture of form illuminate my awareness. These works are my notes to Dear Giotto.”

I had a chance to speak with Deborah about her recent work and her time here in Italy:

Deborah Dancy exhibition @ SACI Gallery in Florence

Have you been to Italy and Florence before?

I have. My first trip here was in the 80’s and I’ve been back four times, always returning to Florence but then traveling out some to other regions of the country.

How do your travels influence your work?

In the past, I’m not sure the work was influenced by my travels. I was so focused on the newness of it all- trying to take it all it. Culture and art in Italy is so complete, so overwhelming that it competed for my attention. Also, I was traveling and not in a fixed location for a period of time. This time, I am stationed in Florence and have been here for almost four months so the looking is longer and things are saturating into my work.  Also, for me, it takes a while before a place has an effect on my work. Walking the streets on a daily basis allowed for a slower building of ideas to take shape. I think you collect colors, shapes, experiences with your mind and you sense of a particular moment and they arise in the work- sometimes when you least expect it, it comes forth and you wonder…where did that come from.

Does being on a temporary sojourn in a foreign land change your approach to painting?

It depends on a number of things, such as access to the kind of studio I may or may not have. I have to adjust my method of working. I knew I’d be painting here and I made a decision to work in water-based medium so I wouldn’t have difficulty transporting them home. I also shifted the scale of my work and made a lot of small square works.

Does language or other cultural experience play a role?

Of course, you’re always trying to contextualize yourself in a foreign country. Can you make yourself understood-are you understanding what is coming toward you? You make yourself available to this lack of control and see what it brings. Sometimes it places you at a disadvantage, because you feel like you’re missing a lot. So the work that gets made comes out this sense of displacement. But often out of that, new discoveries are made.

What were you working on before you left your home in Connecticut to come to Italy?

The work in Connecticut was primarily oil on canvas and medium to large in scale. The work has elements of figuration, fragments of legs and armed entangled. Conceptually the work was about examining a relationship. Formally I was interested in pushing the elements of tangible space through gesture and shifting degrees of specificity.

You are now working with gouache on paper while in Florence for 4 months. What are these pieces about?

I was looking a lot a Giotto before I left home, and there was something about the stillness and the depth of the blue in the sky in paintings. I knew that I planned to work on some paintings that were in homage to him, about Blue, but I didn’t really know what to expect beyond that idea. Obviously the color of the buildings the tone and quality of light in the city entered into the work. I am also intrigued by the formal properties of tangles, nests and brambles, but here structures like scaffolding entered into the work. I began thinking about how artisan built these complex architecture devices in order for artists to use them painting the ceilings and walls in churches. I hadn’t planned on that entering into the work- that’s the surprise element of being somewhere, you respond to the visual saturation of what you are exposed to and they begin to seep into your work.

“The Sky is Not Falling”

What about your students you are teaching here in Florence, also for a semester….how does their experience in Italy affect their work?

Well, it doesn’t so much really, except for the subject matter. They’re focused on observational drawing and I’m more interested in the tension between what is seen and what is imagined.

And your ideas and plans for the near future?

Well, to return to Florence and to see more of Italy, and to keep painting. You never know where it’s going to take you.

Deborah Dancy @ SACI

Deborah Dancy is an abstractionist who obtained her BFA at Illinois Weslyan University in 1973, her MS in printmaking from Illinois State University in 1976, and her MFA in painting at Illinois State University in 1979. Deborah Dancy has been on the faculty in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Connecticut since 1981.  Her professional career has been marked by a number of significant honors and awards, including: a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Connecticut Commission of the Arts Artist Grant, New England Foundation for the Arts/NEA Individual Artist Grant, Nexus Press Artist Book Project Award, Visual Studies Artist Book Project Residency Grant, The American Antiquarian Society’s William Randolph Hearst Fellowship, YADDO Fellow, University of Connecticut Chancellor’s Research Fellowship, Women’s Studio Workshop Residency Grant, as well as a Connecticut Book Award Illustration Nominee.

She has exhibited in galleries and museums such as: Wright State University, Purdue University, The Rye Arts Center, Liz Harris Gallery, LewAllen Contemporary, The Fuller Museum, The Housatonic Museum, The Mattatuck Museum, The College of Saint Rose, The University of Rhode Island, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, The Spencer Museum, Mobius, The Mead Art Museum and The DeCordova Museum. Her work is included in numerous permanent collections including: The Boston Museum of Fine, The Birmingham Museum of Art, The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Montgomery Museum of Art, The Spencer Museum of Art, The Hunter Museum of Art, Vanderbilt University, Grinnell College, Oberlin College Museum of Art, Davidson Art Center, The Detroit Museum of Art, Wesleyan University, Hallmark, General Electric Company, Chemical Bank, Capri Capital, The Bellagio Hotel, and The United States Embassy in Cameroon. Her work is represented by: Sears-Peyton Gallery, New York; G.R.N’Namdi Gallery, Chicago; and Charles Young Fine Prints and Drawings, Portland. Dancy currently lives and works in Storrs, CT.

DEBORAH DANCY: Dear Giotto

ACRYLIC & GOUACHE ON PAPER
Through NOVEMBER 24, 2012

SACI Gallery
Palazzo dei Cartelloni
Via Sant’Antonino, 11
50123 Firenze, Italy
T (+39) 055 289 948
www.saci-florence.edu 

Open Monday – Friday, 9am – 7pm, Saturday & Sunday 1pm-7pm
Admission is free