Are you a Radical Architecture fan? Write down in your diary the dates for the exhibition "Spazio Radicale/Radical Space", opening this month at Prato's Centro Pecci (from 18th December 2021 to 30th April 2022).
The event presents explorations of space proposed by radical architects and contemporary artists: from the imagined space inspired to life, to possible and unlikely spaces, or shared, lived or contested space, without forgetting the metaphorical transfiguration of space.
Opening with "S" by visual poet Luigi Tola, a work that anticipated Archizoom and Superstudio's Superarchitecture, the first section of the event features Gilberto Corretti project for a cultural centre at Prato's Cascine, Archizoom's Dressing Design and Pop interior design pieces such as the Superonda sofa and the Sanremo lamp produced by Archizoom for Poltronova.
From the second half of the '60s Ettore Sottsass and Gianni Pettena subverted the roles of the designer and the architect: Sottsass and the UFO Group's explorations on the relationship between "body, landscape, environment" are juxtaposed in this event to works by Neil Jenny, Andrey Kuzkin and Karin Arink.
Pettena's concepts of identity and nature are instead examined in connection with Tola's visual poetry and Stephen Shore's photography, while the possibility of exploring "other spaces" are represented by Lucio Fontana's slashes and Mario Mariotti's implied voids.
The exhibition then looks at those architects and designers who gathered around the magazine "Casabella", directed in the early '70s by Alessandro Mendini, to investigate the extraurban material culture, like Superstudio did, or denounce, in the case of the UFO Group, "the architecture of bureaucracy"; there is also space for Vito Acconci's encounter between the physical body and the architectural body and for Michelangelo Pistoletto mirror paintings.
The exhibition concludes with a vast section dedicated to the reticular and modular abstractions of Superstudio's Histograms of Architecture and to the "Superstudio - Backstage 1966-1978" series of images as interpreted by the late Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, one of the founders of the group.
The exhibition is good to create links between artists, designers and architects or to play a game of connecting dots with other exhibitions and interventions that younger generations may not know about or may have forgotten.
Those readers who would like to go through the catalogues of previous "radical" exhibitions should check the following previous events: "Superarchitettura", divided in two parts at the Galleria Jolly 2 in Pistoia (1966) and at the Galleria Civica in Modena (1967); Ettore Sottsass's solo shows at Galleria La Bertesca in Genoa and at Galleria Sperone in Milan (1967); Archizoom's exhibition at Mana Art Market in Rome (1968); the Dance Festival and Robert Smithson's intervention organized by Galleria L'Attico in Rome (1969); the historic exhibition "Italy: The New Domestic Landscape" at New York's MoMa (1972, during which the art critic Germano Celant coined the definition "Radical Architecture"), the retrospective of Superstudio at the Schema Gallery in Florence (1972); the famous multidisciplinary exhibition "Contemporanea" held in the parking lot of Villa Borghese in Rome (1973-1974, directed by Achille Bonito Oliva with architecture section curated by Alessandro Mendini) and the 1978 Venice Biennale where Lara-Vinca Masini invited the Radicals.
Image credits for this post
1.
Lucio Fontana
Spatial concept. The waiting, 1960
Hydropainting on canvas
2.
Vito Acconci, Multi-Bed #1, 1992
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Naked men seen from the back, 1962-1987
Color silkscreen on polished stainless
3.
Stephen Shore
Yuma, Arizona, September 23, 1974, 1974 (2003)
Colour photograph
4. Gianni Pettena
Dialogo con Arnolfo (Dialogue with Arnolfo), 1968
5. Archizoom and Superstudio
Superarchitettura, 1966
Poster published for the 1966 exhibition at Galleria Jolly 2, Pistoia, Italy
6. Archizoom and Superstudio
Superarchitettura, 1966 (2002)
Scale model of the 1966 exhibition at Galleria Jolly 2, Pistoia, Italy
7. Superstudio
Niagara or Reflected Architecture, 1970
Colour photomontage edition, with brochures and text, III/XV, 1970
8 and 9. Superstudio
Histograms, 1969/2000
Photo by Ela Bialkowska, 2019
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