In yesterday's post we looked at an exhibition focusing on opera costumes and currently on in Milan. Let's remain in Italy for another day to look at an artist who will be celebrated with a special event later on this week, Ugo Nespolo.
Opening on Friday at Aosta's Centro Saint-Bénin "A modo mio. Nespolo tra arte, cinema e teatro" (In My Way. Nespolo Between Art, Cinema and Theatre; until 8th April 2018), will feature 80 paintings, drawings, theatre maquettes, sculptures, rugs, photographs and posters created by the artist from 1967 to our days.
Born in Mosso, Biella, Ugo Nespolo, studied art in Turin, debuting in the '60s with experimental and Pop Art works with a Neo-Dadaist twist about them. As the years passed he established connections with Arte Povera, conceptual art and Fluxus (together with Ben Vautier he organised in 1968 in Turin a series of events linked with Fluxus).
Playfulness, irony and transgression are the keys to unlock his works: he created paintings that look like colourful puzzles; produced glass and ceramic pieces and combined together different materials (from wood to plastic and textiles); he borrowed from the Futurists, but also from comics and children's books, working with the Italian state television RAI producing title sequences (and more recently cartoons) and ended up creating fun and engaging advertising campaigns for companies such as Fiat, Ferrari, Swatch and Campari.
Featured in events at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern in London and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Nespolo will be celebrated in Aosta with an exhibit featuring artworks arranged in a chronological order.
The event opens with an Arte Povera installation from 1967, a rubber tape anchored to two wooden and formica elements, representing a film strip.
Nespolo's first camera may not be a work of art per se, but it will be on display since it represents a symbolic piece in the artist's career: Nespolo filmed his first movie, entitled "Grazie, mamma Kodak" in 1966 and, from then on, his friends - artists Lucio Fontana, Alighiero Boetti, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Mario Merz, Enrico Baj - appeared in his movies.
There will also be many of his rugs with fragmented images, three-dimensional sculpture-books, a section dedicated to the numbers inspired by his studies on the Golden Ratio, and more tactile sculptures or peculiar installations like his "Avanguardia Educata" (Educated Avant-Garde), a habitable polymaterial installation from 1995 combining Futurism, Bauhaus and Pop Art.
Among the most unusual pieces featured there will be a BMW K1 bike from 1993 and a Black Fin boat, both decorated by the artist in his trademark puzzle-like patterns.
In 1986 Nespolo designed stage sets for Ferruccio Busoni's opera "Turandot" at Connecticut Grand Opera, Stamford, followed by the sets and costumes for Paisiello's "Don Chisciotte" at the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma in 1990 and for Donizetti's "L'elisir d'amore" in 1995. In 2007, he designed stage and costumes for Puccini's "Madama Butterfly" at the Festival Puccini 2007 in Torre del Lago. The exhibition in Aosta will include maquettes, drawing and costumes for some of these performances that will maybe prove more interesting for set designers.
Nespolo preserved his joyful approach to life even when he tackled more socially engaged themes: in 1973 he worked in the psychiatric hospital in Volterra and created two pieces with the patients - a pyramid made of sketches, drawings, puppets and personal objects of the patients and a huge papier-mâché pill that was burnt in the square of the city in a cathartic gesture of protest against those therapies that heavily relied on pharmacological treatments.
Nespolo remains therefore a polyedric personality - a painter, a graphic and costume designer and even an award winning producer of children's shows for the Italian state TV. Young artists should maybe try and rediscover him since he has displayed in his practice a 360° approach to creativity managing to preserve throughout his career a childlike sense of wonder and carefree attitude.
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