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Museum Without Walls
| Article
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20155 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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1 / 1992 |
1,584 Words |
| Author
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Judith Bell
Judith Bell is an art historian and novelist based in
Arlington, Virginia. |
"I usually don't like shows that focus on the art of one country," protests Susan Sollins, executive director of Independent Curators Incorporated (ICI), a nonprofit traveling exhibition service specializing in contemporary art, and curator for Eternal Metaphors: New Art from Italy, the ICI exhibit now ending its year-long tour of North American museums. "The curator comes as a stranger to the country, runs around, gets introduced to people, makes pronouncements about what is and isn't good. But in this case there was a real topic."
While each of the nine artists in the exhibition--Bruno Ceccobelli, Gianni Dessi, Nino Longobardi, Luigi Ontani, Mimmo Paladino, Alfredo Pirre, Fiorella Rizzo, Remo Salvadori, and Ettore Spalleti--have a unique sensibility and style tempered by twentieth-century sophistication and the spirit of Modernity and Post-Modernity, they all share faith in what Sollins calls "the possibility of making a living connection between the specific now and the specific common past." Their works, while very beautiful in the simplest sense, are layered with memory, history, symbolic reference, and metaphor.
In 1987, when her husband, Earle Brown, was composer-in-residence at the American Academy, Sollins spent four months in Rome, time enough, she recalls, to work beyond her introduction, to do a great deal of looking and exploring on her own. "My education began with Idi Pinacelli, now editor of Art Forum, who at the time was curator at the Galleria Nacionale. Going through that collection with her, she shared with Middle East her love of and insights into twentieth-century Italian art. I saw the antecedents of Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia, and Mimmo Paladino, Italian artists who had come on the New York art scene in the eighties. And I began to see a kind of continuum that hadn't been clear to Middle East sitting in New York and looking at this new art coming from Italy."
Upon visiting artists' studios, Sollins began to realize that this continuum extended far beyond the work of artists active earlier in this century. "I remember a conversation I had with sculptor Fiorella Rizzo about a particular piece of her work. We spoke about it on level of what it was formally, and about my response to it. But when I asked her about her own thoughts, she told me the piece was really about the burning of Alexandria and the loss of knowledge to the civilized world. That burning was in the year A.D. 2. Here was an Italian artist who is, as they all are, fully knowledgeable about what's going on in art internationally. They travel; they're well educated, broadly read. Yet in a very natural way they can talk to you
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