MAMbo Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna

Mario Ceroli

21 Dec 2012 - 01 Apr 2013

© Mario Ceroli
MARIO CEROLI
Faccia a faccia
curated by Gianfranco Maraniello.
21 December 2012 - 1 April 2013

From 21 December 2012 to 1 April 2013 MAMbo - Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna presents the exhibition “faccia a faccia” di Mario Ceroli, paying tribute to the internationally renowned sculptor, a leading member of the new generation of artists that in the early sixties initiated on the Italian scene a unique season of change in the course taken by the language of art.

The wide-ranging anthological exhibition, curated by Gianfranco Maraniello, retraces the entire creative career of the artist, who was born in Abruzzi and has made Rome his home. It presents a representative survey of his inexhaustible inventive gift for experimentation with material and exploration of a conceptual universe that makes constant reference to the tradition of art history.

The 47 works on display at MAMbo include some of his most famous large-scale environmental installations, as well as new works presented specially on this occasion.

The artist has conceived the exhibition as a single project, sculptural and architectural at the same time. Turning on its head the principle underpinning his celebrated work-environment of 1966, Cassa Sistina, Mario Ceroli has taken over the extraordinary spaces of the museum’s Sala delle Ciminiere and, starting out from that condensed introversion of architectural elements has projected his art into the extroverted space, heightening its visual impact and expressive force.

Thus the exhibition in Bologna becomes a single entity in which an attentive play of cross-references and connections turns the works into the ‘exploded’ version of a space invented by the artist: the exhibition is laid out in a way that the older works hold a dialogue with the more recent ones, in a direct dialectical exchange that eschews chronological and historiographical criteria.

The title “faccia a faccia“ (‘face to face’) refers to the comparison between the human and the divine that has been inspired by MAMbo's great central hall, so reminiscent of a cathedral.
 

Tags: Mario Ceroli