The exhibition Ugo Mulas / Saul Steinberg's Graffiti in Milan, curated by the Ugo Mulas Archive and Walter Guadagnini, will be in CAMERA's Project Room from 14 February to 14 April 2024 and recounts that event, re-proposing the entire decoration to scale from Mulas' photographs. A selection of about fifteen photographs - some vintage, others printed for this occasion - allow us to enter deeply into the work of these two great representatives of 20th century art, to appreciate Steinberg's iconographic fantasy and the poetic lucidity of Mulas' eye.
In 1961, Saul Steinberg produced an extraordinary graffito decoration of the atrium of the Palazzina Mayer in Milan, commissioned by Studio BBPR, which was overseeing its renovation. An important work, which followed other similar undertakings by the great designer and illustrator in the United States during the previous decade.
When the work was complete, Steinberg asked a young Ugo Mulas to witness the work, both in its entirety and in detail. To help the photographer in his work, the artist also wrote a short text explaining the iconography and meaning of his work, a reflection on the labyrinth starting with the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan, the city where Steinberg had lived before the war. In 1997, the building was renovated again, and the graffiti destroyed: today, only Ugo Mulas' photographs remain of that splendid intervention, capable of restoring both the document of the work and its interpretation.
From October 9, 2024, Pinault Collection presents a major exhibition dedicated to Arte Povera at the Bourse de Commerce. Between heritage and influence, the exhibition features over 250 historical and contemporary works from this major Italian artistic movement of the 1960s.
From October 10th, 2024, to February 2nd, 2025, Palazzo Reale in Milan presents Ugo Mulas. The Photographic Operation, one of the most extensive and detailed retrospectives dedicated to one of its most important authors. Curated by Denis Curti and Alberto Salvadori, it offers an innovative perspective with its main narrative focus on the city of Milan, captured in its many facets.
The Drawing Hall, the space that presents contemporary drawing at the centre of its investigation, opens on 4 October with Paradossi dell’abbondanza (Paroxes of Plenty), the solo exhibition by Marzia Migliora curated by Alberto Fiz, on view until 17 November 2024. As it is customary for this space located on the outskirts of the city of Bergamo, the exhibition project focuses on drawing as a fundamental research tool for production in the contemporary visual arts.
Electric Op is the first major exhibition to examine how the Op art of the 1960s and 1970s related to not only industrial machinery, but also the new electronic media of the dawning post-industrial era. At the very moment that Op artists began making works that short-circuit our optical systems, new video and digital technologies began reformatting the nature of images and how we see. Could it be more than coincidental that the undulating lines of Op art resemble electronic video signals, or that its grids suggest the pixilated structure of digital screens? In fact, many Op artists would turn to using these technologies, some as early as the late 1960s, while at the same time, many of the first video and digital artists openly turned to Op art for inspiration. In this way, Op art became more than just the final chapter of modernist geometric abstraction; it was also the first artistic movement of the global Information Age, heralding the transformation of vision from a mode of embodied perception to an algorithmic process executed by the computer systems that produce and process images today.
Gary Hill has tagged the exhibition Loop Through, referring to a singular work as well as being suggestive of a path or circuit from which to experience the selected works.His multimedia installations, performances and video works incorporate a wide range of materials and technologies, along with diverse linguistic concerns. From his early experiments with video and sound to his complex intermedia installations, Hill has consistently challenged conventional notions of perception, engaging audiences with artworks that operate on multiple levels. The installations range from silent projections of “being” and confrontations with physicality, to ambiguities between inside and outside. The works have been strategically placed to reflect all the industrial spaces that constitute the heart of the Art & Design District Palma, with a total of six industrial spaces and eight installations.
Cutting Clouds is a program featuring actions linked by the common denominator of the ephemeral and the impermanent. The title refers to Cloud Scissors, a work conceived in the early 1960s by George Brecht. A few cards dictating places, times, and modes provide the instructions for a possible combined happening, drawing on multiple events: random directions to follow in order to shift creative boundaries through play and experimentation. The tools bequeathed by Brecht thus provide the stimulus for an exercise in imagination. In the liminal spaces of the museum, interventions and works present a potentiality, an idea of incompleteness by adopting various media—video, painting, poetry, graphics, photography, sculpture, drawing, sound, and performance. Cutting Clouds reflects the movement of clouds that flow fluidly and take shape through our gaze, changing yet never repeating, thus evolving through operations that aim to trigger potential creativity by appreciating the random, the improvised and the indeterminate.
