The performance VB62 comes from a reflection of the artist Vanessa Beecrodft on the Italian sculptural tradition and in particular Sicilian, from the fifteenth century to the Baroque, from Francesco Laurana (Vrana 1430 – Avignon 1502) to Giacomo Serpotta (1656 – 1732, Palermo). The first spent 5 years in Palermo, from 1466 to 1471, leaving important works but especially the “Bust of a Gentlewoman”, said to be Eleanor of Aragon, kept in Palazzo Abatellis. The second, defined by Donald Garstang “the main artist of the stucco in Europe” and by Giulio Carlo Argan “one of the greatest sculptors of the eighteenth century”, realized an authentic stylistic and cultural revolution, renewing the traditionally poor technique of the stucco in refined and fashionable art.

In the apse of the church of S. Maria dello Spasimo in Palermo, Vanessa Beecroft arranges in a radial pattern, on white bases, a group of about twenty women together with 13 plaster casts of naked female bodies that want to personify the “idea of austere and dignified Renaissance nobility”.

The plaster casts, smoothed to look like marble, are reminiscent of funerary sculpture and were made in Racalmuto in collaboration with local workers. The bodies of the women, entirely covered in white, with their hair gathered and also painted, blend with the plaster sculptures, an idea that comes from the vision of Carmelo Bene’s work “Hommelette for Hamlet” (1987).

During the course of the performance, the women, initially immobile, begin to make minimal movements in absolute silence, as if slowly waking up. They remain seated, still, or they stand up and redistribute themselves in the space following simple rules of “behavior” dictated by the artist in all his performances: “don’t speak, don’t move in real time, be distant, don’t look people in the eyes, wait until the end of the event, coordinate your movements with the rest of the group. You are an image….” They pose in a natural way and do not communicate with anyone and their gaze is lost in the void and distant, as if they belonged to another reality. At the beginning the group looks homogeneous, then the women break the composition, moving they lose their color at times, becoming carnal, while the sculptures remain rigid and inanimate elements.

“They are the statues that wake up from the sleep of death – says the artist – to revive themselves, as it is written in the verses of Genesis, through the breath of life”.

In mathematics, the Klein bottle (also called ‘skin of Klein’) is a non-orientable surface that is an area for which there is no distinction between “internal” and “external”.

The Klein bottle has been described for the first time in 1882 by the German mathematician Felix Klein. Gary Hill’s piece is in conversation with Robert Morris’s “Box with the Sound of Its Own Making”. If Morris’ wooden box contains a sound recording that documents the making of his work from start to finish – hammering, sawing, and sanding give way to prolonged silences – in Gary Hill’s case it’s a Klein Bottle with a video of the making of it that is  projected onto the bottle.

In the early Renaissance, the aristocratic palace was redesigned to allow a division between the public and private wings. A public sitting room, accessible to visitors, was placed near the entrance, separated from a suite of private rooms located in the back. The “studiolo” was the most private of all spaces; apart from being used as a library, a reading room, a music room and a cabinet of curiosities – the site of collection of naturalia, artificialia, memorabilia – it had a more specific function – the studiolo was designed as a cognitive laboratory of sorts, a “total environment” dedicated to the improvement of the memory and imagination. The different elements of the studiolo – library, music room, collections of objects and of artworks – were all subordinated to that objective, namely, they were treated as aids to cognitive and intellectual development.

They were presumed to be related to each other by a neo-platonic theory of the human soul that assigned to each its own special role; each part of the studiolo was dedicated to improve an aspect of the cognitive and intellectual capacities of the mind. The aim of Clegg & Guttmann’s project is to reevaluate the studiolo and suggest ways of transforming it into a contemporary form that combines a variety of functions, where the art objects are not treated merely as collectibles but as aspects of an environment dedicated to cognitive and philosophical contemplation. The installation of Clegg & Guttmann was conceived as a direct descendent of the Renaissance studiolo. It is supposed to carry to the present the original preoccupation with memory and imagination. In the contemporary context the problematic can be somewhat different. The attitudes towards memory and imagination have undergone various transformations as was the educational theory that aims to improve them. But the idea of embedding art in a “room for thoughts” or, better still, “room of thought” seems as attractive and suggestive today as it was in the early Renaissance; the work of art should not be treated only as decorative object but as a part of a comprehensive design that promotes a life of learning and contemplation.

In their most recent production, Ilya&Emilia Kabakov have decided to turn their interest more and more towards the great history of art and its masterpieces. In fact, the artists – nourished by the profound conviction that the history of art and human development are intensely linked and dependent on each other – establish in their works a dialogue with the great masters of art, animated by the intent to revive their works and thus keep them alive not only in the memory of the artist but also and above all in the memory of the viewers.

This research is clear in the two works “At the Studio” and “He Never Came Back”.

In “At the Studio” Kabakov pays his tribute to two famous masterpieces: “Las Meninas” by Diego Velázquez and “L’Atelier du peintre” by Gustave Courbet.

As the artist himself points out, the common point between “At the Studio” and “Las Meninas” is the presence of two main characters: a little girl and the artist at work. In Velázquez’s painting, however, the little girl is estranged from both the world of the studio and the artist. In “At the Studio,” instead, she is a legitimate participant in the life of the atelier. She is busy working, and the age difference between the two painters is the main subject of the work; one is at the beginning of her journey, the other at the end of his.

On the other hand, the assonance with Courbet’s “L’Atelier du peintre” emerges in the choice to represent the artist against the background of the painting he himself has painted.

The decision to choose a realist type of painting justifies the artist’s entry into the work of which he becomes a part himself. In this sense, both paintings conceal the same precise metaphor: the artist, through his work, is transformed into a character in the world he himself has created and imagined.

In “He Never Come Back,” Kabakov blends visual fragments of Soviet imagery with those of 17th-century Baroque paintings.

In one part of the painting, on the right, the subject belongs to the Baroque and recalls in its tones and settings a work such as “The Peasant’s Family” by Louis Le Nain; the other part, on the left, belongs instead to the Soviet imagination and shows the interior of a mid-twentieth century factory.

Creating a common horizon is the chain of faces across the canvas; however, while these visages create a link between the two parts, they also accentuate the differences, allowing the changes of history and time to emerge.

In this work, however, as the artist himself notes, there are actually three subjects depicted, connected by invisible threads.

In addition, in fact, to the baroque and Soviet tribute can be seen, fixed on the surface of the canvas, a pair of shoes and a green wooden fence. Apparently incoherent with the rest of the work their presence is actually justified in light of the title “He Never Come Back”.

As the artist explains: someone, to whom those shoes belong, is taking two steps, to leave forever, to disappear from this world, regardless of whether he belongs to the past world of the Baroque or the recent Soviet one. He doesn’t like either of them. For him, they are surrounded by the fence, which is the reason why he always wants to escape.

“A Dora D.”, was made at the former pawnshop in Palermo (Palazzo Branciforte). In the photograph, the artist’s body is in dialogue with the grid structure that connotes the spontaneous wooden architecture of the warehouse, in which vertical and horizontal lines intersect on several levels like the bars of a cage. The work is a tribute to Dora Diamant, the woman who took care of Franz Kafka in the terminal phase of his life when the author wrote his last story entitled “”Ein Hungerkünstler” (A Hunger Artist) (1922), whose protagonist performed publicly in a cage guarded by three guardians, finding himself in the paradoxical situation of earning his bread by fasting.

In his latest body of works, conceived for his solo show “Weightless” held at Lia Rumma Gallery in Naples in 2020 Monterastelli “want to examine how memory works,” he says, “and explore the origins of the narrative and its inevitable corruption” in strong relation to the city of Naples. As the artist states: “After all, Naples seems to be the perfect place for this: it’s a city full of phantoms and phantoms are the verses of history. And, in particular, this is the way the verses of this story are written.”

In Oh Ma’ Belle, Oh My Beau, Why Can’t He Have Three Good Things in a Row?, 2020 – a white terracotta work arranged on sculptor’s easel – the artist engages a dialogue with the city and pays his homage to its ancient history linked in particular to the archaeological sites of Herculaneum and Pompeii, among the most famous sites in the world.

In particular, in this sculptural group the artist makes his tribute to a specific sculptural genre, that of the lupanare, an erotic genre with a sexual background, the most important artifacts of which are today preserved in the Secret Cabinet of the National Archaeological Museum of Naples.

Reinhard Mucha decided to accompany the exhibition of his installation “Island of the Blessed (2016)“ by selected extracts of Salvatore Settis’,  Se Venezia Muore [If Venice Dies] (2016), which concerns how Milan recently dressed up like an icon of modernity, all skyscrapers and curtain walls – ‘just like a boorish peasant putting on his best Sunday clothes in the comedies of the past’, Settis writes, so that now there are ‘two urban models completely at odds without any correlation or sense of harmony’. Mucha plays with this context and provocatively shows us a roof of ancient tiles as an image lying on the ground meticulously spread out on a bed of demolition rubble.

The sense of drama and the key role of memory, its profound reflections and its criticism on urban reality are all chorally expressed in this profane room installation.

How to deal with the remains of our recent past, both as haunting memories and manmade architectures and artefacts, is an eternal obsession for Mucha, whose vocabulary is formed of found building materials.

Ugo Mulas writes: “Duchamp’s photographs would like to be something more than a series of more or less successful portraits. On the contrary, they are an attempt to visually render Duchamp’s mental attitude towards his own work, an attitude that took shape in years of silence, in a refusal to do that is a new way of doing, of continuing a discourse. (…) Posing was the closest attitude to not doing, because anything else Duchamp had done would have been something more and something too much. The portraits in the house or in the museum were not enough for me: I wanted to film him while he was walking, because it seems to me that walking is the most elementary and photographically significant attitude of living, a way of doing that is detached from producing, the most evident attitude of just living.  So, there are some photos of Duchamp walking from his house to Washington Square.

Then there are some photos taken at home, (…) with these I tried to get him to take on revealing attitudes of not doing (…).

Finally, we went to the Museum of Modern Art, and here it was exciting to photograph him among his works from about fifty years earlier, while he looked at them as if they didn’t belong to him, having him pose with his back against the wall, a work of art himself alive among his old things.

(From, “La Fotografia”, Fotografie e testi Ugo Mulas, Giulio Einaudi Editore, Torino 1973)

At a certain moment, I considered the series of “Verifiche” (Verifications) to be finished, closed, and I decided to end it where it had begun. In a certain sense, I acted like an engraver who typesets the plate after the print run has been completed: the glass, which has a decisive importance for my composition, in fact gives precise physical and visual characteristics to the piece, and, once broken, it is the operation itself that cannot be repeated. The result of my gesture was a new image, different from the initial one. And this radical break with what precedes led me to reflect on the intrinsic meaning of “Homage to Niepce”, led me to think of Duchamp; and not only because of the extrinsic circumstance that in Duchamp’s production there is a work that is a large broken glass. I realized, that is, the influence, unconscious perhaps, of an attitude of Duchamp’s, of his not doing, which has so much significance in more recent art, and without which this part of my work would not have been born. Therefore, the photograph is dedicated to his presence.

(From, “La Fotografia” , Photographs and texts Ugo Mulas , Giulio Einaudi Editore, Turin 1973)