ESTATE FABIO MAURI

‘Fabio Mauri. Amore Mio’ is a testament to the artist’s early engagement with themes and ideas that would come to define pop art, before the movement became well-known in Europe when US artist Robert Rauschenberg won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1964. The earliest works in the exhibition are firmly rooted in Mauri’s personal biography and family history. These historical drawings and collages in the vein of neo-dada and proto-pop include comic strips and cartoon elements which were distributed by the artist’s father, Umberto Mauri, who was among the first to import American comics to Italy. Driven by an exploration of the role that these new media have with regards to creating narrative in the post-war years, Mauri deployed fragments of Lil Abner, Popeye, Flash Gordon and Mad Magazine in his works.

In 1957, Mauri began working on his seminal and radical Schermi (Screens). Made with blank canvas or white paper, often citing the iconic and cinematic words ‘The End,’ these objects refer to television and cinema, underscoring Mauri’s interest in the power of the New Media of his time and the mechanisms of communication and mediatic manipulation. In a radical gesture, Mauri voids his screens of any content, narration and ideology, emphasizing that ‘the canvas is no longer. It is exchanged with a distinctively ‘active’ breeding ground for culture and the fermentation of ideas.’ In addition to the series of silk screens Gangster (1974), a portrait of the notorious figure Al Capone, which testifies to Mauri’s engagement with the international pop art movement, the exhibition also includes the large-scale installation Amore Mio (1970). Consisting of 17 individually printed silkscreens that the artist arranged to form an immersive architectural space which requires the viewer’s active participation, the installation has remained unseen since its first showcase in 1970 during the legendary and homonymous exhibition presented by Achille Bonito Oliva in Montepulciano, Italy.

The exhibition precedes the online catalogue raisonné of Mauri’s work to be published at the end of the year, as well as a solo presentation of works on paper at Castello di Rivoli, Italy, opening December 2023. Mauri’s iconic installation Luna (1968) will also be part of a major group exhibition ‘Immersion. The Origins: 1949-1969’ at Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts Lausanne from 27 October 2023.