The Capitoline Superintendency for Cultural Heritage is proud to announce the second appointment with the exhibition series dedicated to the Italian artists that emerged in the ‘90s, curated by Costantino D’Orazio at MACRO – The Contemporary Art Museum of Rome.
The new solo shows involve Federico Pietrella (Rome, 1973) and Donatella Spaziani (Ceprano, Frosinone, 1970).
Federico Pietrella (Rome, 1973) paints using a time stamp instead of a classical brush. His images result from the overlapping of stamped paint that marks the date of the days he worked on the canvas. Each painting keeps the memory of the time Pietrella used for the creation, registered by his gestures. His work thus turns into a progressive accumulation of marks, in which each of his stamps stays visible and unerasable, without allowing the artist to get backwards and eventually rethink the image.
At MACRO, Pietrella presents a series of artworks in charcoal, where he has gradually erased layers of material in order to let the figure come out.
Two apparently opposite procedures, that investigate the relationship between image and time, painting and space, in a perfect balance between presence and absence.
The exhibition is part of the project “Notes on a generation”, that study the research of Italian artists who emerged in the 1990s.
Donatella Spaziani’s (Ceprano, Frosinone, 1970) research is thoroughly connected to time. The artist presents a series of new artworks at MACRO. In the exhibition hall, vintage televisions show photographic self-portraits the artist realized when she started using a digital camera. Seen inside these old-fashioned objects, particularly familiar to those born in the 1970s, the images compose a backward journey into the personal history of the artist, following her frequent movements from one city to another. The photographs, shot while the artist was running, investigate the relationship between the surroundings and her body. The artist’s body loses all its energy and becomes unit of measure of the space and the objects it encounters.
Spaziani also placed on some tables animal furs deprived of their bones and organs. She kept their external surface which recurs in a series of maps drawn on wallpaper where the artist’s body transmutes into an animal due to a process of osmosis. In this way, the interior time of the artist joins with nature and architecture, in an unsteady but clear balance.
The exhibition is part of the project “Notes on a generation”, that study the research of Italian artists who emerged in the 1990s.
The exhibition series “Notes on a generation” continuew in may 2016 with the solo shows of Matteo Basilè and Gioacchino Pontrelli.