Cardi Gallery is delighted to announce its participation in Frieze Masters 2021, opening in Regent's Park on October 13th, with Dando un taglio al passato, featuring a selection of outstanding works created by key Italian artists between 1956 and 1979. Starting with the display at booth F07, featuring pieces by Agostino Bonalumi, Tano Festa, Lucio Fontana, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Mimmo Rotella and Mario Schifano, the exhibition expands online in the Frieze Viewing Room, with further masterpieces by Alighiero Boetti, Giulio Paolini, Mimmo Rotella and a more recent creation by Paolo Canevari.
Dando un taglio al passato offers an overview of the vivacious artistic production that characterized Italy over a particularly significant arc of twenty-five years, spanning from the Economic Miracle to the Anni di Piombo. As the country's socioeconomic fabric was transforming rapidly, new attitudes emerged in the visual arts arena.
In a radical gesture of rupture, Fontana created his Concetto Spaziale series, piercing through and later slashing open the sacrality of the canvas, letting the fourth dimension into his monochrome paintings: infinite space. A fellow Spatialist, Bonalumi, developed 'extroflexions', shaped, monochromatic canvasses, similarly highlighting a force pushing out from beneath the surface of the work, as is the case for Bianco, 1979.
Mimmo Rotella broke with tradition through several new techniques. With the photo emulsion, he relinquished the act of painting to the medium itself (Il Risposo, 1964 (1972). Furthermore, with décollage (Un Pezzo da Film, 1956; Baskerville, 1961; Dagli Appennini alle Ande, 1962) and retro d'affiche (literally 'the back of a poster'), he presented the removal of ripped print advertisement posters, the paper initially glued to a wall which he then placed on traditional artistic supports. While the décollages display the recto, the retro d'affiche—as Senza Titolo (1958) beautifully demonstrates—reveals the verso, focusing on the hidden part, the covered side attached to the very walls of the city, of which it carries the remains.
The quick urbanization and the buzz of cities like Rome and Milan provided the fertile soil for the creation of a modern, consumeristic desire populated by icons that became prominent not only in the works of Rotella's but also of Schifano and Festa, shaping Italian Pop, with its archetypes of memory in technicolour. Totemic images, like commercial logos, were prominent in the practice of Schifano, who often combined them to personal motifs, such as the intensely coloured palm trees and starry sky of Palm, 1973. Festa appropriated an everyday domestic object–the doors of a 'stile arte povera' walnut wardrobe, as the ground for his painting in enamel and acrylic, Armadio Cieco (Blind Wardrobe), 1963, creating a conceptual trompe l'oeil suspended between the fetishisation of the object and abstraction.
Attention to the prosaic, everyday materials is central to the Arte Povera movement, whose protagonists—amongst which Pistoletto, Boetti and Paolini–distanced themselves from the canons of high art. For example, Pistoletto's Maria a Colori, 1962-1993, a life-size portrait of the artist's wife printed on polished steel, includes the viewer in the composition. With Il Vero, 1971-72, Paolini visibly broke with the tropes of fine art academic styles by collaging a shredded copy of a renaissance treaty on drawing, while Boetti's Calligrafia, 1971 humorously plays on the elements of chance and repetition in his beautiful handwriting of telephone numbers.
Paolo Canevari's switchblade knife frozen in the act of slashing a motorcycle tyre, in his Autoritratto, Self-portrait, 1998 is set in the footsteps of the poveristi for his choice of mass-produced material, yet it encapsulates the attitude of rebellion in that very gesture of puncturing.
'Cardi Gallery is incredibly proud to be taking part in this year's edition of Frieze Masters. I am particularly looking forward to welcoming collectors and visitors alike to our booth at the fair after last year's hiatus and to our beautiful second home in Mayfair' (Nicolo Cardi)
Cardi Gallery represents these artists: