Metropolitanscape

The title of the exhibition, with its use of English, reminds us of a famous essay by Federico Zeri: “The visual perception of Italy and the Italians in the history of painting”. The text is a masterly analysis of the way in which in Italy, at the time of Cimabue, people acquired a more or less homogenous perception of their territory through the images of art history. Today it would obviously be impossible to give a homogeneous notion of our cities (or our metropolis) through art. At the beginning of the 20th century art increasingly became the centre, the aesthetic-social laboratory of modernity. In the course of the past century and in particular in the last decades, cities become for artists – and maybe not just for them – a place in which to experiment processes of participation, analysis, enquiry or where to question one’s identity. Metropolitanscape, the urban landscape in contemporary, art does not intend to document relations between the city, the community and the artistic experiences. Rather, the intention is that of exploring, as if looking at a diorama, fragmented and discontinuous perception we have of of our cities and presenting the works of art as a “means of exploration”. And this is done from the inside of a historic building, Palazzo Cavour in Turin. The exhibition has various sections as “Mindscape”, “Townscape”, “Utopia”, “Corpo o figura d’artista” (artist’s body or figure) and “urban landscape”, “Maps”, “Towers”. Among the many and often contradictory definitions of contemporary city there is the one by Arnulf Rainer with his “Hiroshima Zyklus” (1982) which is possibly the most concrete and which inaugurates the set of exhibition halls.

Metropolitanscape
Kuratoren: Marco Di Capua, Giovanni Iovane, Lea Mattarella

mit Magdalena Abakanowicz, Franz Ackermann, Emily Allchurch, Maja Bajevic, Bernd und Hilla Becher, Peter Blake, Botto & Bruno, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Marina Ballo Charmet, Christo & Jeanne-Claude, Tony Cragg, Nicola de Maria, Dre Wapenaar, Richard Estes, VALIE EXPORT, Rainer Fetting, Anna Friedel, Günther Förg, Carlos Garaicoa, Kendell Geers, Isa Genzken, Gilbert & George, Dan Graham, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Hirschhorn, Francesco Jodice, Ilya Kabakov, On Kawara, William Kentridge, Hendrik Krawen, Guillermo Kuitca, Lina Kim, Urs Lüthi, Nicola de Maria, Gordon Matta-Clark, Fausto Melotti, Mario Merz, Gian Paolo Minelli, Ryuji Miyamoto, Matt Mullican, Vik Muniz, Sabah Naim, Adrian Paci, Luca Pancrazzi, Paolo Parisi, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Anne & Patrick Poirier, Marjetica Potrc, Arnulf Rainer, Gerhard Richter, Thomas Ruff, Mario Schifano, Thomas Schütte, Franco Scognamiglio, Bernardo Siciliano, Donatella Spaziani, Thomas Struth, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Frank Thiel, Sissel Tolaas, Luca Vitone, Weng Fen, Michael Wesely ...