Art Around the City in Catania

May 28, 2013 6:00 pm

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July 27, 2013 6:00 pm

La Materia di un Sogno – Collezione Palo Brodbeck, curated by Gianluca Collica, Alessandra Ferlito and Gianpiero Vincenzo and promoted by the Fondazione Brodbeck in Catania, is opening today. The exhibition showcases artworks by Gabriella Ciancimino, Carmelo Nicosia and Carmelo Nicotra on eight bus lines around the streets of downtwon Catania. This initiative is one of the many that precede the opening on May 25 at 5:00PM of one of the most important contemporary exhibitions that Sicily has hosted in the last few years.

For more information, please contact:

Fondazione Brodbeck
93 Via Gramignani
I – 95121 Catania
Phone:  +39 095 7233111
Mobile: + 39 3476815258
Fax:. +39 095 2933777

www.fondazionebrodbeck.it
info@fondazionebrodbeck.it
www.facebook.com/pages/Fondazione-Brodbeck/105282896466

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1st International Art Biennial in Palermo

January 10, 2013 6:00 pm

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February 3, 2013 6:00 pm

 

Palermo – city of art – hosts a prestigious art event, the 1^st International Art Biennial  The exhibit under the sponsorship of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage of the Region of Sicily, the Province and Municipality of Palermo, aims promoting the city as a cultural protagonist of the Mediterranean area.

The event supported by Sandro Serradifalco has the collaboration of personalities of the world of art and culture such as as Vittorio Sgarbi, renowned art critic.

The committee under the direction of Paolo Levi – another art critic and writer – selected 814 works of art of some of the finest international and Italian artists. The selection offers a wide view of the modern and contemporary art scene.

The Palermo Biennial puts art at the center of attention and brings out innovative forms of artistic expression. The exhibition wants to represent the connection between past and present and dedicates a special section to the most influential artists of XIX century.

The Biennial takes place in four different locations: the Politeama Theater, the Loggiato San Bartolomeo and Villa Malfitano Whitaker are within Palermo. In Monreale, the Museo Civico d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea “Giuseppe Sciortino” host the fourth site of the exhibit dedicated to international artists as well as the 19^th century collection.

Visitors will experience the magnificence of Norman monuments, baroque and Liberty style architecture, Arab gardens through artistic creativity.

The Biennial Exhibition will be inaugurated on January 10 and will remain  open through February 3.

By Maria Lina Bommarito

For more information:

www.biennaledipalermo.it

Il rito della luce (rite of light) 2012

June 21, 2012 8:00 pm

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June 24, 2012 11:00 pm

The rite of light takes place only once a year close to the summer solstice. The Fondazione Fiumara d’Arte organizes this event every June. Its founder Antonio Presti is an entrepreneur turned philanthropist to fight the Mafia in Sicily. Visitors will have the possibility to access the Pyramid (photo below), a sculpture created by artist Mauro Staccioli. Among the artists selected this year are Giovanni Levanti, Mario Trimarchi, Aldo Baker, Chris Kabel, Michael Obrist, Vered Zaykovsky and Wyssem Nochi.

About Antonio Presti
Presti was born in Messina in 1957. He has been staging his resistance for 30 years. At the age of 21 he decided to use the fortune left by his father – a public works contractor who worked hand in glove with local politicians and Cosa Nostra bosses – to combat the mafia system on the island. How? By investing in culture. His maiden project was called La fiumara d’arte [The Torrent of Art]. It involved building a sculpture park, the biggest in Europe, from the Nebrodi mountains, near Pettineo, his father’s village, all the way to the northern coast of the island.

More about this event at http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=134969626578131

MITO Project

May 10, 2012 10:00 am

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July 8, 2012 10:00 am

Visit Sicily through the modernity of Giò Pomodoro and Jiménez Deredia, Gian Marco Montesano and Pino Pinelli’s figurative art. A pleasant and evocative itinerary in the footsteps of Myth, organised by Il Mito Contemporaneo, an International Sculpture and Painting Exhibition organized by the Regional Board for Tourism, Sport and Performance Art to promote the history and charm of some Sicily’s most beautiful and famous cities: Taormina, Palermo, Lipari and Trapani/Segesta. This international exhibition, now at its second edition (under the artistic direction of Massimiliano Simoni) is part of the prestigious programme Il Circuito del Mito.

Contemporary art transforms Sicily into a great open-air workshop. Archaeological sites, temples, ancient theatres, cathedrals, historical city centres and common spaces become exhibition venues. The red thread is the Myth in its most diverse and original articulations as they accompany the history and itinerary of mankind, from Hermes to the great protagonists of the 20th century, seen through the eyes of four contemporary artists of international renown who have revisited, re-modelled and shaped it throughout their work.

These four exhibitions are sure to attract many amateurs, enthusiasts and tourists, who will come from all over the world to discover, admire and explore the beauty of our land, disseminated with a variety of artworks – from monumental sculptures in white marble and bronze to figurative paintings, fibreglass and great oil canvasses.

For more information, visit www.ilmitocontemporaneo.it. Check with each venue for opening times and entrance fees.

The 58th Taormina Film Fest

June 23, 2012 5:00 pm

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June 28, 2012 11:00 pm

The 58th Taormina Film Fest, Italy’s principal summer film event, is going to take place from June 23 to 28, 2012. This year, Mario Sesti is the editor in chief of the festival.

Mario Sesti (born 1958), has worked as specialist in film restoration of Italian postwar cinema, as film critic for Italian news-magazines and newspapers, as film programmer for TV network. He realized and directed films about Pietro Germi, Federico Fellini and the restoration process, which was shown at MoMA, at the Festival of Cannes and at the Locarno Film Festival. [From IMDb.com]

The Nastro d’Argento goes to Cesare non deve morire by the Taviani brothers.

Source: Taormina Film Festival

Carla Accardi (born 1924), painter

A Settori from artnet

Carla Accardi (born October 9, 1924 in Trapani) is an Italian painter who contributed significantly to the acceptance of abstract art in Italy. In 1947, she co-founded the Forma 1 Marxist-inspired art movement with Ugo Attardi, Pietro Consagra, Piero Dorazio, Mino Guerrini, Achille Perilli, Antonio Sanfilippo and Giulio Turcato. She first exhibited in the United States in 2001 at MoMA PS1.

Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of use for details. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.

Il Gruppo di Scicli at the Bernaducci Meisel Gallery in New York

September 13, 2012 8:00 pm

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October 13, 2012 8:00 pm

Il Gruppo di Scicli will be exhibiting at the Bernaducci Meisel Gallery in New York.

Founded by a number of young intellectuals around the Giornale di Scicli, the group is characterized by a will to rediscovery and exploit the territory, to preserve and pass on its culture, to have an important and direct role in tracing its cultural and historic identity. The group is mainly composed of painters and sculptors and Piero Guccione was its first President. Its activity, mostly personal or collective exhibitions, started in 1980, with the organization of a conference on Elio Vittorini and an exhibition of graphic and engraving arts. From www.sicilynet.it

Bernarducci Meisel

37 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019
Between 5th and 6th Avenues
3rd Floor

Phone: (212) 593-3757
Fax: (212) 593-3933
Website: www.bernarduccimeisel.com

VIEWING HOURS

Tues. through Sat., 10am – 5:30pm
July: Tues. through Fri., 10am – 5pm
August: By appointment only

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Artists for TribeArt Exhibition in Catania

April 14, 2012 9:30 am

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May 1, 2012 7:00 pm

TribeArt is a free magazine about contemporary art in Sicily and Italy. It started as a website in 1999 and became a magazine in 2003. This publication – also sent to subscribers all over Italy – has established itself as an authoritative voice in the island’s art work. It is a bit like Gallery Guide here in the US. Now it risks closing down.  Advertising from galleries and local patrons was enough to cover the € 2,500 needed to publish each issue, but the current economic crisis has tightened the belt of most businesses.

To avoid this, 100 Sicilian artists have joined forces for the Artists for the Artists for TribeArt exhibition at Palazzo Platamone in Catania (Palazzo della Cultura) from April 14 through May 1. Over 100 artists are present at this event and artworks to benefit TribeArt start from € 300.

For more information, please go to www.tribenet.it

Useful information

Palazzo della Cultura
Phone: +39 3388913549
Phone: +39 3463851506

Free Entrance

Schedule

Monday-Saturday 9:30am-1:00pm /
Sundays and holidays 4:00pm-7:00pm

 

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It looks like Sicily Inspired Antoon Van Dyck

The Financial Times reported this interesting story over the weekend. I cannot report the whole story here for copyright infringement. But it looks like Palermo played an active role in this great artist’s inspiration. Please find below a link to the article.

[...]

Van Dyck’s first biographer was the Italian Giovanni Pietro Bellori. According to Bellori, the painter sailed to Palermo in spring 1624 and, on arrival, painted the viceroy’s portrait, paid a visit to and painted Anguissola Sophonisba, the most famous female artist of the day, and made some religious images of St Rosalia, a patron of Palermo. But when a violent outbreak of plague struck the city he scuttled back to Genoa to complete his remaining Palermitan commissions in safety. He was in the city a mere four months.

More at ft.com

Renato Guttuso (26 December 1911 – 18 January 1987)

His best-known paintings include Flight from Etna (1938–39), Crucifixion (1941) and La Vucciria (1974). Guttuso also designed for the theatre (including sets and costumes for Histoire du Soldat, Rome, 1940) and did illustrations for books. Those for Elizabeth David’s Italian Food (1954), introduced him to many in the English-speaking world. A fierce anti-Fascist, “he developed out of Expressionism and the harsh light of his native land to paint landscapes and social commentary.”

He was born in Bagheria, near Palermo in Sicily, but from 1937 lived and worked largely in Rome. An anti-fascist, he joined the banned Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1940 and left Rome to become an active participant in the partisan struggle from 1943. He was also an opponent to the Mafia. In 1972 Guttuso was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize. In 1976 he was elected to the Italian Senate as a PCI representative for the Sicilian constituency of Sciacca.

Renato Guttuso’s father, Gioacchino Guttuso, was a land surveyor and there are many portraits of him in the collection donated to the mayor of Bagheria. The precocious capabilities of the artist are apparent from the very first paintings from 1925.

His bourgeois adolescence offered him plenty of stimuli. Guttuso lived close to a house amongst the Valguarnera villas and Palagonia, which he would soon represent in paintings inspired by the cliffs of Aspra.

In Palermo and in the same Bagheria he saw the complete ruin of the nobility of the splendid villas of the 18th century, abandoned to urban decay as a consequence of political infighting within the municipal chambers. At the same time, his family suffered a period of economic stress because of the hostility shown by Fascists and clergy towards his father.

He went to Palermo for high school studies, and then to the University, where his development was modelled on the European figurative trends of the day, from Courbet to Van Gogh and to Picasso. His works opened to doors for him in Milan and to further travel throughout Europe.

As his expressionism became stronger we notice scenes of nature in flower, the lemon trees, the saracen olive trees, all in an environment suspended between myth and island insularity, that, when sent to the Quadriennale expo of 1931, he joined a collective of six Siciilian painters, acclaimed by the critic Franco Grasso as a “disclosure, a Sicilian affirmation”.

Back in Palermo he opened a studio in Pisani street and together with the painter Lia Pasqualino and the sculptors Barbera and Nino Franchina, formed the Gruppo dei Quattro (“The Group of Four”).

He rejected every academic canon, putting free figures in space and searching for the pure sense of color. Guttuso joined the artistic movement “Corrente”, which stood for free and open attitudes, in opposition to the official culture, and chose a strong anti-fascist position in the thematic choices through the years of the Spanish Civil War.

During a stay of three years in Milan, where he entered the cultural circle of Corrente di Vita, Guttuso developed his “social” art, which highlighted a moral and political commitment visible in paintings like Fucilazione in Campagna (1938), dedicated to the writer García Lorca, and Escape from Etna.

Moving to Rome, he opened a study in Via Margutta where, because of his natural exhuberance, his friend Marino Mazzacurati nicknamed him “Unbridled”. He lived close by to the significative artists of the time: Mario Mafai, Corrado Cagli, Antonello Trombadori, keeping also in contact with the group from Milan of Giacomo Manzù and Aligi Sassu.

The controversial painting for which he is best remembered, at the time derided by the clergy and the fascists because it denounced the horrors of the war under a religious cover, is Crocifissione (“Crucifixion”). Guttuso wrote in his diary: “it is the symbol of all those who endure insults, jail, torture for their ideas”.

He did not stop working during the years of World War II, his work ranging from landscape glimpses of the Gulf of Palermo to a collection of drawings entitled Massacri (“Massacres”), that clandestinely denounced slaughters such as the Fosse Ardeatine.

In those years he met and married Mimise, who will become his confidant and faithful spouse, and model as well. After the liberation of Italy from Nazi-fascism he finished Muratori in riposo (“Workers resting”), china ink and watercolor of 1945, a symbol of rebirth of which Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote in 1962:

“The shapes of ten workers

emerge white over white masonry

the noon is that of the summer.

But the humiliated flesh

projects a shadow; is the disarranged order

of the white colors, that is faithfully followed

by the black ones. The noon is a peaceful one“.

Then he painted Peasant Who Hoe (1947) and Peasants of Sicily (1951) in which the pictorical language became clear and free of all superfluous elements. Guttuso wrote that those were preparatory sketches for Occupation of uncultivated lands of Sicily, exhibited in the Venice Biennale in 1950, asserting:

“

I believe that these are legacies to my deeper and remote inspiration. To my childhood, to my people, my peasants, my father land-surveyor, the garden of lemons and oranges, to the gardens of the latifund familiar to my eye and my feeling, where I was born. Sicilian peasants who hold the primary position in my heart, because I am one of them, whose faces come in front of my eyes no matter what I do, Sicilian peasants so important in the history of Italy…

”

In 1950, Guttuso joined the project of the Verzocchi collection (in the civic Pinacoteca of Forlì), sending, a self-portrait, and the work “sicilian labourer”.

He succeeded in astonishing his audience, alternating between the luminous and full vision of color of Bagheria on the Gulf of Palermo to the Battle of the Bridge of the Admiral, in which he depicted his grandfather Ciro as a Garibaldine soldier. He painted also a series from live about the fights of peasants for the occupation of lands, the zolfatari, or glimpses of landscape between cactus and prickly pears, as well as portraits of men of culture like Nino Garajo and Bruno Caruso.

Fascinated by Dante’s model, in 1961 he made a series of color drawings, published in 1970, as Il Dante di Guttuso, depicting the characters of Hell as examples of human history, confirming the versatility of his talent.

In the late 1960s and 1970s he completed a suite of paintings devoted to the feminine figure, a motif that became as dominant in his painting as it was in his life: Donne stanze paesaggi, oggetti (1967) was followed by a series of portraits of Marta Marzotto, his preferred muse of many years.

His most famous “palermitano” painting is the Vucciria (the name of Palermo’s market), in which, with raw and bloody realism, he expressed one of the many spirits of the Sicilian city.

Guttuso died in Rome at the age of 75.

After the death of his wife, he reconciled with the Christian faith with which he had been critical and donated many of his works to his hometown Bagheria, now housed in the museum of the Villa Cattolica.

Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of use for details. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.

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