The selection of works presented here seeks through the emergence of surface anomalies, visual outbursts, pictorial crises, to announce a catastrophe. A visual tension is created where the symptom saturates the expectation of becoming, without then concluding, pausing in foreboding. The partial opening of the images, the dripping, seething matter embody this suggestion.

It was common practice for miners in the past to enter the belly of the earth accompanied by a chick in a cage in order to know when the air was too saturated with firedamp, a highly flammable, colourless and odourless gas often the cause of explosions in mines, which could be perceived by the small bird that began to shake and quiver its wings in its presence. This practice meant that one could somehow prevent, see coming, catastrophe. Just as the divinatory wings of the chicks quivered in the face of calamity, these paintings come alive with unnatural and premonitory implications, on the verge of detonation. Set in a space used as a chapel, cramped, crude and poorly lit, they are immersed in an environment charged with sacredness and at the same time close to the memory of mining caverns. This dual reading unfolds in the citation of figures taken from both sacred iconography and profane imagery, emphasised in the gazes of madonnas and bodies subjected to the crisis.

Leonardo Dalla Torre  

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ARTISTS 

Leonardo Dalla Torre    

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NP-ArtLab presents Stargazers I and Stargazers II, two group exhibitions which develop respectively in the gallery spaces of Padua and Milan and bring historicized artists into dialogue with exponents of the contemporary panorama. The works, created with different mediums, turn their gaze towards a single theme: astronomy.

The Stargazers project, conceived by Neri Pagnan (NP-ArtLab), originates from the proximity of the Padua gallery to the Specola, home of the Astronomical Observatory as well as one of the most critical research facilities of the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF ), a representative symbol of the city and its history, and with the Department of Astronomy. Through two exhibitions, the continuous suggestions derive from the fascination that human beings have always had for the universe, the science that studies its manifestations, and how artists find nourishment in the mysteries of the celestial vault and its powerful aesthetics.

Stargazers I opens the reflection in the Padua venue with a selection of works that address the themes from different points of view: Serena Gamba, Natale Addamiano, Matteo Nasini transport us inside sidereal surfaces, while John Torreano, Silvia Mariotti, Serena Vestrucci, Antonello Ghezzi engage in dialogue with the material and translate its role and meaning, in search of suggestions that transpire from the universe. Visions that meet with the famous lunar surfaces of Giulio Turcato and the multifaceted Tony Dallara. At the centre of the exhibition space is the work by the Antonello Ghezzi duo entitled Alla Luna, a treadmill whose display shows the distance that separates us from the Moon. The interactive installation invites you to participate actively in a collective space mission.

The second part of this exhibition, Stargazers II, takes shape in Milan in collaboration with Martelli Fine Art. Also, in this case, the gallery venue plays a fundamental role in the development of the reflection on the link between art and astronomy: this is Palazzo Cicogna, which housed Lucio Fontana's studio for a period. Of the vast production that characterized Fontana's research, two works from the 1950s suggest Stargazers II. The exhibition opens with an installation that reproduces the pattern of the Galassia Fabric created in 1955 (altered colour), combined with a blotting paper from 1953 that anticipates its aesthetics and an impressive variant printed on silk that refers to the celestial constellations. Alongside these works, there are new looks between matter and light that become sky with Mirella Bentivoglio, Antonello Ghezzi, Paolo Icaro, Silvia Mariotti, Matteo Nasini, Takis, and Eugenia Vanni, in a succession of spatial surfaces. The installation by Giovanni Oberti completes the display, which accompanies the entrance corridor towards the main room.

Stargazers I (Padua) and Stargazers II (Milan) represent a dialogue between knowledge in which science and art come into firm contact, demonstrating how two different disciplines can contribute to a transversal reading of the universe. 

The project is accompanied by a text by Annika Pettini.  

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ARTISTS 

Mirella Bentivoglio 
Lucio Fontana  
Antonello Ghezzi
Paolo Icato
Silvia Mariotti
Matteo Nasini
Giovanni Oberti 
Takis
Eugenia Vanni     

ARTISTS BIOGRAPHIES

Catalogue download ︎︎︎

                           
                  
               

NP-ArtLab presents Stargazers I and Stargazers II, two group exhibitions which develop respectively in the gallery spaces of Padua and Milan and bring historicized artists into dialogue with exponents of the contemporary panorama. The works, created with different mediums, turn their gaze towards a single theme: astronomy.

The Stargazers project, conceived by Neri Pagnan (NP-ArtLab), originates from the proximity of the Padua gallery to the Specola, home of the Astronomical Observatory as well as one of the most critical research facilities of the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF ), a representative symbol of the city and its history, and with the Department of Astronomy. Through two exhibitions, the continuous suggestions derived from these places have triggered the choice to tell the fascination that human beings have always had for the universe, the science that studies its manifestations, and how artists find nourishment in the mysteries of the celestial vault and its powerful aesthetics.

Stargazers I opens the reflection in the Padua venue with a selection of works that address the themes from different points of view: Serena Gamba, Natale Addamiano, Matteo Nasini transport us inside sidereal surfaces, while John Torreano, Silvia Mariotti, Serena Vestrucci, Antonello Ghezzi engage in dialogue with the material and translate its role and meaning, in search of suggestions that transpire from the universe. Visions that meet with the famous lunar surfaces of Giulio Turcato and the multifaceted Tony Dallara. At the centre of the exhibition space is the work by the Antonello Ghezzi duo entitled Alla Luna, a treadmill whose display shows the distance that separates us from the Moon. The interactive installation invites you to participate actively in a collective space mission.

The second part of this exhibition, Stargazers II, takes shape in Milan in collaboration with Martelli Fine Art. Also, in this case, the gallery venue plays a fundamental role in developing the reflection on the link between art and astronomy: Palazzo Cicogna, which housed Lucio Fontana's studio for a period. Of the vast production that characterized Fontana's research, two works from the 1950s suggest Stargazers II. The exhibition opens with an installation that reproduces the pattern of the Galassia Fabric, created in 1955 (altered colour), combined with a blotting paper from 1953 that anticipates its aesthetics and an impressive variant printed on silk that refers to the celestial constellations. Alongside these works, there are new looks between matter and light that become sky with Mirella Bentivoglio, Antonello Ghezzi, Paolo Icaro, Silvia Mariotti, Matteo Nasini, Takis, and Eugenia Vanni, in a succession of spatial surfaces. The installation by Giovanni Oberti completes the display, which accompanies the entrance corridor towards the main room.

Stargazers I (Padua) and Stargazers II (Milan) represent a dialogue between knowledge in which science and art come into firm contact, demonstrating how two different disciplines can contribute to a transversal reading of the universe.

The project is accompanied by a text by Annika Pettini.  

IT




ARTISTS 

Natale Addamiano
Tony Dallara
Serena Gamba
Antonello Ghezzi
Silvia Mariotti
Matteo Nasini
John Torreano
Giulio Turcato
Serena Vestrucci  

ARTISTS BIOGRAPHIES

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NP-ArtLab presents, in collaboration with Martelli Fine Art, a selection of works by artists Mirella Bentivoglio and Serena Gamba in dialogue with each other. The exhibition aims to relate two artists of different generations but who use verbal-visual practice as a medium.

The work of Mirella Bentivoglio (Klagenfurt, 1922) takes place in a totally poetic sphere: between language and image, language and material, language and object, language and environment. In particular, her works in the exhibition are closely linked to the representation of the egg, linked to the letter O, which, according to the artist, is a symbol of the Universe, of nothingness and everything, of emptiness and fullness, but also of creation and motherhood, a fundamental concept for the artist, which she has repeatedly identified as an experience that has profoundly influenced and guided her in her artistic career. The egg returns frequently in the artist's works, often linked to books, a specific sign of the intellectual dimension, a symbol of culture. 
A veritable continuum with the works of Bentivoglio and the poets of the Nuova Scrittura in general is represented by Serena Gamba (Moncalieri, 1982). Her research revolves around the meaning of painting and its declinations in relation to the visual and applied arts. The images of Art History are emptied of their original meaning to be reworked in order to bring out their essential nature far from imperfect and preconceived forms. The genres and materials of painting, the bases of written and spoken language, the constituent elements of drawing are condensed into new structures and primary signs, activating a process of reconstruction of a new image. It is these structural elements that go on to define an architecture, a visual alphabet, leaving complete freedom of interpretation and re-elaboration. The works on display perfectly reflect the artist's poetics where the concepts of memory and oblivion coexist. The act of writing and describing the original painting is a reflection and testimony of memory: it is an attempt to create an intimate encounter between the individual and his or her own act of remembering and memorising all of Art History. The hand-stitched letters become a vivid testimony of something that was present and is now disappearing or will soon disappear. It is writing that becomes the means and the way to slow down the process and welcome oblivion. An archive is created, an instrument for memory.


Serena Gamba, visual artist, she works on the theme of memory and oblivion through word, sign and form. Her research moves around the meaning of Painting and its declinations in relation to other visual and applied arts.
The images of the History of Art, emptied of their original meaning, are reworked to bring out their essential nature, far removed from flawed and pre-constituted forms. The genres and materials of painting, the foundations of spoken and written language, the constituent elements of drawing and geometry are condensed into new structures and primary signs, at the same time activating a process of negation and reconstruction of a new image. These structural elements, be they sculptural or pictorial, define an architecture, a visual alphabet, address and leave full freedom of interpretation and reworking. Thus, he draws on the things of the world, be they classical works or primordial forms, to redefine a personal imagery, to generate an aesthetic and formal sensitivity towards the inexplicable mystery of Painting. He has exhibited in the group shows "Sollazzo Ottico" (Roccatre Gallery, Turin), "Appunti di sociologia urbana" (Alessio Moitre Gallery, Turin), "Dell'origine e delle sue variazioni - Serena Gamba/Alessandro Gioiello" (Isolo17 Gallery, Verona), "Serena Gamba, Autos - Eleonora Manca, Catessi" (Alessio Moitre Gallery, Turin), exhibits in the circuit "Art Site Fest" (Castello di Govone / Govone (CN)), at the exhibition "Lacerto" (Galleria Alessio Moitre), "Esercizi di scrittura" (BI-BOx Art Space / Biella), "La Camera delle Meraviglie" (Isolo17 Gallery, Verona), "Visione d'Interno" (Galleria Alessio Moitre - Burning Giraffe, Turin), "IncontrArTi - Simboli e riflessi verso l'Oltre" (Vercelli). She exhibited in solo shows 'Datum - Dida' (Van Der Gallery, Bolzano), 'Monologue' (Galleria Alessio Moitre, Turin), 'Opera al Nero' (Isolo17 Gallery, Verona).
Winner in 2021 of the "A Collection" Prize (Art Verona), in 2019 she wins the Artkeys Prize in the painting section and is a finalist in the Nocivelli Prize and the Yicca Contest. Finalist in 2018 at the Combat Prize, in 2017 he wins the Tina Prize Beijing edition, participates in 2016 at the Lissone Prize. In 2021 he founded Spazio PPP, a space for confrontation and real exchange aimed at creating new relationships between visual artists, curators and poets within a reality uncontaminated by typical city times and dynamics together with artist Alessandro Gioiello.

Mirella Bentivoglio, a poet and verbo-visual artist, was born in Klagenfurt (Austria) on 28 March 1922, to Italian parents, Margherita Cavalli and the scientist Ernesto Bertarelli. She received a multilingual education, studying in German-speaking Switzerland and England. In 1949 she married university lecturer in International Law Ludovico Matteo Bentivoglio, whose surname she adopted. In her early youth, she was the author of both oil paintings and books of poetry in Italian and English (published by Scheiwiller and Vallecchi, and reviewed by critics such as Giorgio Caproni, Italo Defeo and Mario Praz). Later on, she expressed her interest in the combined use of verbal language and images, linking up with the verbovisual movements of the international artistic neo-avant-gardes of the second half of the 20th century, becoming one of its leading figures. In 1968 he was awarded the qualification to teach Aesthetics and History of Art in the Italian Academies. He received scholarships and research grants from the Salzburg Seminar for American Studies (1958) and the Getty Institute in Los Angeles (1997). From the practice of Concrete Poetry, Visual Poetry and Visual Writing, which marked his entry into the sphere of new experimentation, he moved on to a personal form of object-poetry from the 1960s onwards. Gradually, in the 1970s and beyond, he explored the languages of performance, action-poetry and poetry-environment, setting up large symbolic structures of linguistic matrix on public land (including the famous Ovo di Gubbio). Central and long-standing has been her work on object books. She also played a decisive and enlightening role in the field of contemporary art as animator and curator of exhibitions dedicated to women's art. In particular, she curated and realised, for the 38th Venice Biennale (1978), the exhibition Materialisation of Language at the Magazzini del Sale, which exclusively featured works by female artists, and which still today represents an emblematic unicum of the work of women artists of those years, intent on claiming their own well-defined "female" creative space in the second half of the 20th century.
Mirella Bentivoglio has been awarded numerous prizes both for her poetic and artistic activity and for her critical and organisational work.
In 2011, she donated her rich collection-archive of female art, collected over years of strong commitment also as exhibition curator, to the MART (Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto).
She died in Rome in spring 2017. One year after her death, a day of commemoration was held in her honour at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Vittorio Emanuele in Rome, which presented the fund named after her (donated to the library by her three daughters, Marina, Leonetta and Ilaria). It contains volumes, exhibition catalogues and various materials from her vast library-archive. In 2019, the Mirella Bentivoglio Archive was set up online, with the aim of promoting and enhancing her work. In the same year, on 14 May, a new exhibition space for Mirella Bentivoglio was inaugurated as part of the Spazi900 itinerary, created within the National Library in Rome. The space named after Bentivoglio, which houses the permanent exhibition of some of her works, is next to spaces dedicated to authors such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Elsa Morante and Italo Calvino.

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Mirella Bentivoglio
Serena Gamba 

                           

               

NP-ArtLab presents the exhibition CHANGING SHAPES with works by Leonardo Dalla Torre, Giulio Paolini and Frédérique Nalbandian.

Three artists of different generations, united by a strong interest in the classical world but proposed with different eyes. Fragments and busts of statues alternate with images belonging to the History of Art and the Masters of painting of the past.
The three sculptures by Giulio Paolini (Genoa, 1940), made of plaster, are named 'Proteus', 'Proteus (II)' and 'Proteus (III)', referring to the mutable Greek god who had the ability to transform himself into any form he wished. Quotation, duplication and fragmentation are the three themes that emerge in this series and summarise the intellectual themes dear to the artist himself. Like the multiform Proteus, this sculptural group can be admired from different angles, creating a poetic meditation on the metaphysical nature of artistic practice.
A pictorial vision of classicism is offered to us by Leonardo Dalla Torre (Venice, 1995). In the space he paints, bodies, faces and gazes take shape, evoked by the forms of past painting outlined by the Masters of Art History. They are used as a pretext for an unexpected intervention. Form is often compromised, subtracted and distorted.
The dialogue continues with the French artist Frédérique Nalbandian (Menton, 1967). Three imposing busts, made by working and handling Marseille soap, are named 'Panacée I', 'Panacée II' and 'Panacée III' and represent the Greek goddess of universal healing. The long drapes covering the goddess' bodies recall the expressiveness of the classical period. If the visitor were able to touch the works after wetting his or her hands, a process of change of the material itself would be triggered, making the sculpture constantly becoming and changing. As a result, a further dialogue with contemporaneity is created, involving the viewer in the creative process of the work itself.

CHANGING SHAPES is closely linked to the concept of change and fragmentation of the material and the perception of the work itself. A continuous becoming that allows the observer to meditate and reflect on the metaphysical nature of the artistic practice of the three different artists in dialogue with each other.


Leonardo Dalla Torre was born in Venice in 1995. He grew up in the city's historic centre and graduated from the Liceo Artistico Statale in Venice in 2013, continuing his studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, graduating in Painting in 2017 and in Graphic Art-Design in 2019. As a painter, he deepens his research by investigating figuration and portraiture as his main themes.
The models used draw both from the images of the History of Art and the Masters of painting of the past, and from his own contemporaneity, alienating contextual differences, accumulating the expressive characters of the body and the flesh, detecting their symptoms and openness in a painting that seeks the imminence of a calamity, suspending the images in a perpetual deflagration.

Giulio Paolini born on 5 November 1940 in Genoa, Giulio Paolini lives in Turin Since his first participation in a group show in 1961 and his first solo exhibition in 1964, he has exhibited in galleries and museums all over the world. Major retrospectives have been held at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1980), Nouveau Musée, Villeurbanne (1984), Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart (1986), Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome (1988), Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz (1998) and Fondazione Prada, Milan (2003). Recent anthological exhibitions include those at the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2014), Fondazione Carriero, Milan (2018) and Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin (2020).
He has participated in several Arte Povera exhibitions and has been invited several times to the Kassel Documenta (1972, 1977, 1982, 1992) and the Venice Biennale (1970, 1976, 1978, 1980, 1984, 1986, 1993, 1995, 1997, 2013).
In 2022, he was awarded the Imperial Prize for Painting, the most important award in the field of art. His work can be found in renowned public and private collections both nationally and internationally.From the very beginning, Paolini has accompanied his artistic research with reflections collected in books he has edited himself: from Idem, with an introduction by Italo Calvino (Einaudi, Turin 1975), to Quattro passi. Nel museo senza muse (Einaudi, Turin 2006) and L'autore che credeva di esistere (Johan & Levi, Milan 2012). He has also created sets and costumes for theatrical productions, among which the projects created with Carlo Quartucci in the 1980s and the sets for two operas by Richard Wagner directed by Federico Tiezzi (2005, 2007) stand out.

Frédérique Nalbandian is a French multidisciplinary artist born on 3 April 1967 in Menton. A sculptor, she also creates drawings, installations and performances. Most of her in situ soap sculptures evolve both internally and externally, changing over time. Sometimes interactive, they require the visitor's participation. After taking her first drawing courses during her studies at Davis High School (en) in California, Frédérique Nalbandian entered the Ecole Nationale d'Art Décoratif d'Aubusson in 1988, where she spent a year, before entering the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Art in Villa Arson in 1989 to devote herself to artistic creation.
In 1994, she obtained an artistic residency dedicated to drawing at the Fondazione Ratti in Como under the direction of Anish Kapoor and Karel Appel. In 1996, she obtained the Diplôme National Supérieur d'Expression Plastique (DNSEP).
She sculpts soap, carving it or modelling it. Its different states: solid, liquid, foam, effervescence, dripping, stalactitisation derive from the action of water.
In her works she also uses poor materials such as plaster (in the mouldings and plastered roses), water, fabric, wool threads, glass and terracotta.
She moulds soap, shapes it and creates forms that she stops or lets evolve, transforming time into a medium. Her vocabulary of plastic forms is constantly expanding: precipitates, collapses, rolls, fragments, columns, partitions, walls, ropes or directly related to the anatomy of the human body: ears, brains, skins, skulls, hands, phalluses. Some were imposed by the material itself. Her forms, in their composition and the process they undergo, become poetic, charged with a metaphysics of matter that evokes the passage of time, erosion, transformation and metamorphosis. The allusion to Francis Ponge's text “Le Savon” was decisive from the outset and took shape during a series of talks in Cerisy during the Contemporary Writer's Workshops in 2015, where she met Pascal Quignard.

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ARTISTS


Leonardo Dalla Torre
Giulio Paolini 
Frédérique Nalbandian