Dep Art Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Pino Pinelli. Being a poet with a single word. Painting from the 1970s to the Present curated by Federico Sardella, conceived with the artist, and realized in collaboration with the Archivio Pino Pinelli. With this exhibition, Dep Art Gallery, ten years after the first exhibition dedicated to the artist, pays homage to Pino Pinelli, who passed away on April 30, 2024, at the age of 86. The exhibition retraces the evolution of his artistic journey, from the first monochrome experiments of the 1970s to the famous "broken rectangle" that marked the main turning point in his investigation, to the large disseminations and the most recent works, some of which have never been presented before.
Pino Pinelli dedicated over fifty years of research to painting and color, exploring their possibilities, variations, and potentials, without ever straying from the original intuition and creating a method whose analytical premises have never wavered. Always described and included in the trend defined by Filiberto Menna as "Analytical Painting," his work, although evidently linked to the more traditional painting, ventures into an area that also involves relief and consequently three-dimensionality, so much so that his works appear as fragments of an infinite, magmatic, and pulsating palette.
As the artist himself stated: "My work is composed of multiple elements: the sense is manifold, as there is a problem of gradation - that is, a slow transformation of the initial data (color) -; a problem of interaction with the wall (passive recipient), for a total relationship; a problem of tactility - transgression of the material (unprepared canvas that betrays the canvas itself, transforms); the poetics of materials - the works are of reduced proportions, pure intentionality; I attempt a visual filling of intentionality."
On the occasion of the exhibition, a bilingual volume (Italian and English) will be published, whose contents were evaluated and agreed upon with the artist himself in the weeks before his passing. In addition to the essay by Federico Sardella, which places the artist's work in contemporary context through a series of suggestions and formal analogies, there will be an in-depth analysis by Sara Uboldi, offering a new reading of the work through neuroaesthetics, and a contribution by Lorenzo Madaro dedicated to ceramic production.
The book is further enriched by a conversation between Pino Pinelli, Federico Sardella, and Antonio Addamiano, collected and recorded at the artist's home, and a dialogue with Alessandra Pinelli focused on the history of the archive and operational methods. The publication narrates over ten years of assiduous collaboration between Pino Pinelli, Antonio Addamiano, and Dep Art Gallery, also presenting major events proposed in public and private spaces in Italy and abroad, such as Palazzo Reale and the Gallerie d'Italia in Milan and the MAMM in Moscow.
The Italian artist Pino Pinelli is known for his minimalistic, sometimes large-scale installations which challenge and alter the traditional idea of painting.
Opening in Milan in 2006 with Mario Nigro’s solo exhibition Opere di Mario Nigro, Dep Art Gallery presents compelling artworks by modern and contemporary Italian and international artists. The gallery moved into its current location in Via Comelico, a former school with substantial exhibition spaces, in 2015. Dedicated to presenting contemporary Italian art, Dep Art Gallery has also been the Turi Simeti archive centre—archiving the artist’s legacy and producing a catalogue raisonne of artworks on canvas—since 2013.
