BOlzano, Mar 28 (askanews) – Is it possible to live an exhibition as if you were inside a novel like Don Delillo’s “Underworld”? Is it possible to physically feel the presence of the New York of the eighties, with its energy and contradictions, while in an elegant exhibition space in South Tyrol?
“Graffiti”, at the Museion in Bolzano
The answer to both these questions is yes: it can happen by visiting the “Graffiti” exhibition at the Museion in Bolzano, which is confirmed as one of the most original places of culture in Italy, with a very strong and lively international vocation. “There have already been many exhibitions on graffiti – the curator Leonie Radine told askanews – but this is really another angle, another perspective, another speech on graffiti, which is reflected more as a way of looking at urban realities and urban landscapes that as a movement that is historicized in an institutional exhibition”.
70 years of spray painting works
The project collects works that cross seven decades and tell an urban movement created to be ephemeral, starting from the interventions of the writers on the metro trains, by definition never stopped, which then entered the galleries and the art system.
“I believe that the pieces in this exhibition-added the New York artist Ned Vena, called to co-cure the exhibition-reflect a much wider form of looking at art, which is in a certain sense determined by graffiti, which are used in some way as a visualization mechanism. So with Leonie, we have been able to isolate these strange overlaps and these strange points of contact and interface that are more a typical type of contemporary art, and I do not intend to call it typical as a kind of diminutive term, I mean only one type of what you would see in a gallery, and the experiences I had with graffiti, from the inside and from the outside of this world “.
From Keith Haring to Lady Pink
And if there are absolutely powerful works like a huge Keith Haring, or a picture signed by Lady Pink with Jenny Holzer, or even a Christopher Wool It is important, it is even more amazing to realize, seeing it in the works, of how much the aesthetic of graffiti then influenced all the art that came after it.
“After graffiti used the spray paint as the main tool – added Leonie Radine – every simple line of spray has always been associated with graffiti and rebellion of urban youth culture. There are so many things that emerge if you see a simple black line of spray paint on a piece of canvas ».
The urban space of art as a tool of struggle
And what emerges, at the level of emotion of the spectator, is precisely the sense of being in a space that is the urban one of art as a tool of struggle, of the affirmation of what previously was even outside the gaze.
This is the strength of Museion and the happily revolutionary vision of its director Bart von der Heide. A force that becomes desire, so engaging that, looking at certain graffiti, you have the very strong feeling that, to return to the metaphor of Delillo’s novel, at a certain point a miracle may appear, such as that of the face of the girl Esmeralda on an advertising billboard, when the lights of a metro train illuminated him in “Underworld”.
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