Cardi Gallery is proud to present Vincenzo Agnetti | Tempo e Memoria [Time and Memory], an exhibition dedicated to Italian conceptual artist, poet and essayist Vincenzo Agnetti (1926-1981), organised in collaboration with the Archivio Vincenzo Agnetti.
Taking place simultaneously across Cardi's two galleries in London and Milan, Vincenzo Agnetti | Tempo e Memoria explores the artist's unique and poetic reflections on language, time and memory through a comprehensive selection of works dating from 1969 to 1975. Installed over three floors of the Mayfair gallery and two floors of the Milan space, the exhibition features Agnetti's celebrated Felts and Axioms alongside rarely-seen installations that chart his radical and inventive use of images and text.
A central figure in the Italian Conceptual Art movement of the early 1960s, Agnetti first gained renown as a writer and theorist in the Milanese avant-garde alongside Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni, whose journal Azimuth voiced the ideals and aspirations of a new generation. In 1962, the artist left Italy for Argentina, where he entered a self-proclaimed period of 'no-art', a critical prelude to his later creative endeavours. Across a short yet remarkably prolific and influential career – from 1967 until his premature death in 1981—Agnetti engaged with the cultural and philosophical debates of his time, channelling post-war preoccupations with media, history and the written word into a deeply personal artistic vision. Although keenly aware of the limits and contradictions of language, Agnetti relied on words as both artistic tool and medium, constantly dissolving and reconfiguring their potential to generate meaning.
Having studied acting at Milan's Piccolo Teatro school prior to becoming an artist, Agnetti often adopted a performative stance in his practice, insisting on the role of the audience in giving life to a work of art. In a rare display, an entire floor of the gallery is devoted to recreating one of his experimental works of 'Static Theatre', a type of performance he developed throughout the 1970s. Elisabetta d'Inghilterra Elizabeth of England, a prescient meditation on the intersection of mass culture and institutional power, was originally staged during the 1976 Venice Biennale, and will be re-enacted for the first time as part of the London exhibition.
Agnetti's iconic Felts—which he painted and engraved with both English and Italian words—offer poetic statements, aphorisms and fragments of letters that point to the evocative powers of language as well as its material and aesthetic qualities. Time and the complex processes of memory are at the heart of the artist's practice. His emblematic Book forgotten by heart, first conceived in 1969, serves as a centrepiece to the exhibition in this respect. A traditional medium for assimilating knowledge, here the book's contents have been hollowed out and remain only as a present absence, an apt metaphor for Agnetti's view of cultural history as a whole. The paradoxical phrase 'forgetting by heart', first coined by the artist in the late 1960s, alludes to the ways in which the past—which encompasses our knowledge and lived experience—is ultimately 'forgotten', internalised, and absorbed into the depths of our unconscious as we move into the future.
With his Axioms, a group of black bakelite panels inscribed with cryptic diagrams and philosophical propositions, Agnetti maps out the elusive pathways of thought itself. Through a series of metaphors, tautologies and contradictory statements related to time, he questions how universal concepts are developed and communicated within a society. Juxtaposing the precise language of mathematical formulae with the abstract and free-flowing mechanisms of human thought, the works function as an extension of the artist's intellectual process. They engage the viewer in a playful visual and semantic exchange, initiating a kind of psychological and critical activity without disclosing any resolute meanings.
Press release courtesy Cardi Gallery.
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