"Arti and Architettura: 1900 - 2000"
2004-10-03 until 2005-01-09
Palazzo Ducale
Genova, , IT Italy

The exhibition, organised by Palazzo Ducale, gathers together and documents the approaches made by artists into the field of architecture – artists who have imagined and often executed houses, skyscrapers, urban complexes and airports, or who have produced paintings and sculptures directly or indirectly related to architecture – as well as those of architects who have thought in sculptural terms, meaning those who have designed and created buildings with a high expressive and plastic value, and are committed to producing works with a strong visual component, even trespassing into photographic and pictorial exploration. 

A utopian adventure, encroaching sometimes into “archisculpture”, whose protagonists – artists and architects from Kazimir Malevich to Vladmir Tatlin, from Antonio Sant'Elia to Giuseppe Terragni, from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to Piet Mondrian, from Le Corbusier to Frederick Kiesler, from Constant to Jean Dubuffet, from Frank Gehry to Claes Oldenburg-Coosje van Bruggen – are committed to designing ideal spaces, volumes and pathways, based on forms and colours which come not from functionality but from pure creativity, visual and plastic, typical of visual exploration, acting on the basis of common assumptions about their impact on the city and on life. 

The exhibition is organised in three parts: the first dedicated to the architects and artists of the historic avant-gardes, up to and including the Sixties (1900-1970: Abbot, Adams, Albers, Alechinsky, Al’tman, Antonioni, Archigram, Archizoom, L. Baldessari, A.G. Bragaglia, Branzi, Brassai, A. Burri, Cartier-Bresson, Chaplin, Chashnik, César, Chernikov, Chiattone, Christo & Jeanne-Claude, Clair, Constant, Crali, Dassin, Delaunay, Depero, De Sica, Domela, Dubuffet, Evans, Feininger, Finsterlin, Flavin, Fontana, Friedman, Godard, Gonãarova, Gorin, Griffith, Gropius, Henri, Hitchcock, Hollein, Hundertwasser, Isozaki, Itten, Kandinskij, Keaton, Kertesz, Klee, Klein, Klucis, Lang, Larionov, Le Corbusier, Léger, Leonidov, LeWitt, Libera, Licini, Lingeri, Lissitskij, Lo Savio, Maleviã, Mansurov, Manzoni, Marchi, Mel’nikov, Mendelsohn, Miller, Moholy-Nagy, Mollino, Molnàr, Morris, Murnau, Oud, Ozenfant, Pannaggi, Pasolini, A. Pomodoro, Prampolini, Radice, Resnais, Rietveld, Rodãenko, Rosi, Saint Phalle, Sant’Elia, Scharoun, Schlemmer, Siegel, Smithson, Sokolov, Somaini, Steichen, Strand, Suetin, Superstudio, Tanguy, Tati, Tatlin, Täuber-Arp, Taut, Terragni, Tinguely, Tobey, Van der Leck, Van Doesburg, Vedova, Vertov, Vesnin, Vidor, Welles, Weston, Wiene, Wright e altri.); the second, which embraces/focused on the contemporary period in more itemised fashion (1970-2000: Abraham, Allen, Acconci, Ambasz, Amelio, Ando, Armajani, Asymptote, Aulenti, Aziz+Cucher, Basilico, Becher, Bellini, Bolande, Botta, Bourgeois, Cantafora, Casebere, Cook, Dean, Dennis, Diller & Scofidio, Durant, Eggleston, Eisenman, Ehrlich, Elmgreen & Dragset, Erwitt, Ferreri, Friedlander, Fuksas, Gehry, Ghirri, Gilliam, Graham, Greenaway, Hadid, Hartmann, Herzog & de Meuron, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Hirshhorn, Holl, Isozaki, Jodice, Hejduk, Hollein, Kabakov, Kapoor, Kellner, Koolhaas, Langlands & Bell, Lee, Lynn, Maki, Meier, Mendini, Misrach, Morphosis, Nouvel, Oldenburg-van Bruggen, Opie, Oppenheim, Peichl, Peress, Pesce, Piano, Proyas, Purini, Rai, Rio Branco, Sarfati, Schütte, Scolari, Scott, Shore, SITE, Siza, Slominski, Soleri, Sottsass, Sugimoto, Toderi, Ungers, Watanabe, Wenders e altri.); the third, directed at constructing, in Genoa’s squares and streets, and in the atriums and courtyards of historic palaces, ephemeral structures bearing the signatures of some of the major artists and architects of the world, from Gaetano Pesce to Renzo Piano, from Aldo Rossi to Maria Nordman, from Anselm Kiefer to Dennis Oppenheim.To exemplify the interaction between the various forms of expression so typical, firstly, of the modern utopia and, secondly, of the contemporary languages of the last three decades, the first two sections of the exhibition will have within them features devoted to various kinds of artistic expression, such as, for example, photography, literature and the cinema, in each case in relation to the subject of architecture. The route through the exhibition, a sort of jam session of the arts – painting, sculpture, film, photography, books – and architecture, will be the result of collaboration between the director and Gae Aulenti, who together created the exhibition devoted to Italian art which the Guggenheim Museum of New York staged in 1994 ("The Italian metamorphosis, 1943-1968"), making use also of the talents of Pierluigi Cerri for the graphic design. - The city of Genoa as a whole will also be involved in the exhibition, not only through installations created by contemporary artists and architects, but also through the use of billboards, 6 metres by 3 metres in size, which are normally employed for advertising purposes. These will be used to present images of photographs and drawings by artists and architects, and will be located at fifty crucial points around the city at three different stages of the run of the exhibition, a sort of visual expansion of the exhibition into the entire city. 

The catalogue which accompanies the show is intended as a comprehensive publication on the subject, and contains contributions from Italian and foreign scholars – historians of art and architecture, philosophers, historians of the cinema and photography, and also an anthology of texts by artists, photographers, writers and architects, a chronology of events in art and history and a general bibliography.

IMAGE
Thomas Kellner
from his monument series

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