30 Nov 2012

The Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz presents Mario Nigro

The KUNSTSAMMLUNGEN CHEMNITZ will show the exhibition MARIO NIGRO. Works 1952-1992 from 1 December 2012 to 3 February 2013. Nigro (1917-1992) is one of the most important representatives of geometrical abstraction in Italy. The exhibition will highlight about 32 large works dating from the last four decades of the artist's life. Curated by Francesca Pola, the retrospective exhibition is being organized together with the Archivio Mario Nigro 20 years after the artist's death.

Following the catalogue raisonée edited by Germano Celant in 2008, the first retrospective exhibition of Mario Nigro's oeuvre in Germany is now being shown. The 32 works have been chosen so as to underscore the complexity and originality of this artist's oeuvre. Mario Nigro created new visual languages in the later post-war period which opened his work to embrace an international perspective by way of a continuous analysis of the complex systems of paintings. As Francesca Pola writes: 'His radical and fundamental position had matured as early on as the close of the 1940s, during that same period in which parallel definitions were achieved in the form of Alberto Burri's matteric investigation, Lucio Fontana's pluridimensional and experimental Spatialism, Giuseppe Capogrossi's unmistakable sign and the free gestuality on the part of Emilio Vedova'. 'Nigro choose to once again start out from the origins of non-objective experience', creating an artistic vision that came close to 'the very breathing of existence - not in descriptive but in universal terms - in order to give life to images capable of interpreting the drama of contemporary existence, made up of the continuity of relations and the absences of confines and borderlines'. His constant and coherent visual language is characterised by 'a poetic of inventive and cognitive continuity which underlies all of his artist production' of which the works on exhibit exemplify its evolutionary iter.

In the first room the visitor finds for example works which the artist exhibited in the room dedicated to him at the XXXIV Venice Biennale of 1968 where he presented three-dimensional wall and floor works. The second room presents the works belonging to the cycle entitled 'Pannelli a scacchi' ('Panels with Checks') including Scacchi (Checks) of 1952, 146x116 cm, characterised by the perspective series of optical-perceptive meshes to which the artist gives movement, from both the structural and chromatic points of view and with evident reference to the neo-plastic grids by Piet Mondrian and to the interpretation of the relationship between colour and emotion in the abstract expressionist key by Wassily Kandinsky. The third room exhibits the works belonging to the 'Spazio totale' cycle such as Spazio totale: divergenze simultanee drammatiche (Total Space: Simultaneous Dramatic Divergences) of 1954-1959 (162x127 cm). The exhibition concludes with works which belong to the 'Ritratti' ('Portraits') and 'Dipinti satanici' ('Satanic Paintings') cycles.