The future of contemporary art has passed through Artissima. Confirming the fair’s ability to capture and convey the most innovative trends in advance, our Artissima The Forerunner column presents a selection of artists who took part in past editions of Artissima and are now showing work in some of the world’s most prestigious contemporary art institutions.
Today for Artissima The Forerunner we present: MARCELLO MALOBERTI
► on view at MACRO, with show MUSEO PER L’IMMAGINAZIONE PREVENTIVA — EDITORIALE, open until 27 September 2020.
Find out more: MUSEO PER L’IMMAGINAZIONE PREVENTIVA — EDITORIALE
This first exhibition devised by the artistic director Luca Lo Pinto is conceived as an editorial: fifty-five works that encourage visitors to discover the renovated architecture and spaces of MACRO, along multiple perspectives and pathways — fragmentary and anomalous at times — while suggesting directions, positions, imaginaries and languages that will be explored by the museum’s new programming.
Museum for Preventive Imagination — EDITORIAL, exhibition view, MACRO, 2020. Marcello Maloberti, Martellate, 2020. Courtesy Studio Marcello Maloberti; Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan.Image: Ph. Roberto Apa. Courtesy MACRO — Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome.
► participant at Artissima 2019, with the site specific project ...ma l’amor mio non muore, realized with the gallery Raffaella Cortese and set up in the magic ballroom of the Principi di Piemonte di UNA Esperienze, the historic 5-star hotel in the centre of Torino
Learn more about the artist:
“…ma l’amor mio non muore is the title of the site-specific project by Marcello Maloberti (Codogno, 1966) set up in the magical ballroom of the Principi di Piemonte di UNA Esperienze, the historic 5-star hotel in the centre of Torino. The title comes from a book by G.E. Simonetti from 1971, …Ma l’amor mio non muore. Origini documenti strategie della cultura alternativa e dell’underground in Italia, in which the typical mimeograph style of the counter-culture meets the radical language of Situationism, offering instructions on how to make a Molotov cocktail, how to defend yourself against tear gas or assert your rights against search and seizure, suggesting a romantic enthusiasm for destruction.
The Salone delle Feste (ballroom), a space from the 1930s conserved in all its elegant splendour, is transformed into a stage where the spectacle has already taken place: 14 concrete eagles lie smashed on the floor as traces of a damnatio memoriae directed at the symbols of an unknown power. In the silence the echo of the crashing of the eagles seems to hover, creatures born equal and made individually unique by the results of their fall. The theme of destruction, of the violent gesture as a generative act, has been part of the poetics of Maloberti for years, almost as if to demonstrate an endogenous crisis of sculpture. In this installation the vertical dimension of the monument and of flight is transformed on a horizontal plane composed of parts of sculptures that suggest the poetics of the fragment of Giulio Paolini. Fallen in their last flight, the wings of the eagles, their proud heads, claws, breasts and beaks generate multiple forms in a setting of great visual impact, conceived as the final scene of an act of performance. Archaeological relics strewn on the ground, they are the remains of a past glory in their paradigmatic destruction. The symbolism of the eagle is open to infinite interpretations, challenging the validity of regal grandeur. The pieces scattered on the floor become a sort of whole, a single body, and each eagle is reborn from its parts. The references, as often happens in Maloberti’s work, are multiple: the Departement des Aigles of Marcel Broodthaers, the effigy of the Roman eagle on the flag of the Italian Social Republic during the years of Fascism, the American dollar, Franco Battiato who sings “Le aquile non volano mai a stormi” (eagles never fly in flocks).”
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Credits cover photo: Museum for Preventive Imagination — EDITORIAL, exhibition view, MACRO, 2020. Marcello Maloberti, Martellate, 2020. Courtesy Studio Marcello Maloberti; Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan. Image: Ph. Roberto Apa. Courtesy MACRO — Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome.
