Italy Made in Art: Now

 ITALY MADE IN ART: NOW

CONTEMPORARY ARTS AND INDUSTRIAL DESIGN

Curated by ACHILLE BONITO OLIVA

Dates:  1 June – 15 July 2006

Venue: Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai Gate #7, People’s Park, No. 231, Nanjing West Road Shanghai, China

The exhibition shows a sample of Italian artworks, chosen among the most interesting and meaningful searches conducted in Italy in different fields of culture (art, design, music, theatre, cinema and dance). “Italy Made In Art: Now” intends to suggest a multifaceted but unitary intellectual path and to represent the interrelation and exchange of ideas among the arts. That has on one hand allowed a stimulating comparison between the different 'representation' fields, and on the other contributed to strengthen the cultural environment, bringing about the process of renewal of the languages and the sharpening of the intuition of different artistic personalities, who have specified sophisticated aesthetic codes and revolutionary telling languages, which today identify some distinctive features of Italian culture.

"In some way figurative artists and artificer of other expressive languages are the fruit of a history that finds its roots in memory and in today’s reality the stimulus for new formal experimentation. This represents the important feature of a febrile mentality, whose emblem seems in the end to be found again in Leonardo’s maxim "art is a mental thing" (A.B.O.).

The layout of the “Italy Made In Art: Now” exhibition, in the shape of a maze, is truly unique. Moving about the “private” rooms of a conceptual “Mediterranean house”, the Exhibition snakes through “courtyards” that lead to the public space of an “Italian Square”. The labyrinth is formed by the works on display: fine arts, design, cinema, music and theatre, to create an ideal outline of the brilliant scope of Italian artistic expression from the latest 50 years.

The arrangement of works is neither chronological, nor didactic. It forms a sensory path drawing the viewer across live spaces conceived as private interiors where works of fine arts (paintings, sculpture, installations, photographs) naturally coexist with creative industrial design (furniture, lamps, sofas and functional or decorative objects).

The visual urge happens, therefore, through a sequence of bi-dimensional and tri-dimensional images, fixed and in motion (videos, video installations, films, documentary films), finding further prods in the music, the utmost sublimation of the image, to determine an amplified perception of the space and the time.

The exhibition will be on show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, a contemporary building, in glass and steel, wide and open to the city, symbol of a future in the continuous search for content.

The aim of the exhibition is not only to celebrate and promote Italian creativity across China, but to create a bridge between the evolving course of the Italian arts and the flow of renewal that epitomizes the city of Shanghai, true emblem of the rebirth of a "metropolis", model of architectural experimentation, urban planning, cradle of arts and reference point of the vision of the future.