Where and when
Book presentation curated by Laura Vecere
Speakers Carlo Sisi and Franco Speroni
The author will be present
The self-portrait, a genre that has always been practiced in artistic language, in the contemporary corner the paradigm of physiognomic similarity while maintaining the ‘presence’ of the author in the work, revealing it in clues and symptoms that show an action from a more ‘level. backward compared to that of the immediate appearance of the visible. Today the self-portrait takes place in constellations of modalities that are sometimes difficult to relate to each other.
Deepening the work of a group of artists, from the sixties to today (Robert Morris, Luciano Fabro, Bruce Nauman, Giulio Paolini, Jan Vercruysse, Renato Ranaldi, Cindy Sherman, Daniela De Lorenzo, Gillian Wearing and Mark Wallinger), the essay finds a guiding thread of the radical renewal of this subject in the particular relationship that each artist establishes with the great tradition. A bond based on the assimilation of metamorphic processes that have always determined the artistic operation. Practices, technologies and languages change and also the way in which the artist looks at himself as a subject-object of reflection, especially after the dissolution of the representation widely consumed over the last two centuries.
Laura Vecere
Graduated in Architecture at the University of Florence in 1976, she has been teaching History of Contemporary Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence since 1977. From 1991 to 1997 she was correspondent for Tuscany for “Il Giornale dell’Arte” and still collaborates with specialized contemporary art magazines. Author of essays and books on the theme of the city, architecture and the garden, she conceived and edited Dopopa Landscape, an event of territorial art born in Fiano in Tosacana (1996 – 2006). The project has developed through conferences, specialized publications, exhibitions in the museums of Certaldo and Palazzo Pitti and, above all, with permanent creations: the gardens (created between Fiano and Certaldo) designed by artists such as Remo Salvadori, Hidertoshi Nagasawa, Marco Bagnoli and Fabio Grow up. Between 2002 and 2009 he curated a series of monographic exhibitions of contemporary Tuscan artists at the Marino Marini Museum in Florence. In 2005 he curated the exhibition, Sopra-Places, Verbania Pallanza Landscape Museum, and Nagasawa, at the Il Ponte Gallery in Florence. In 2008 he curated an exhibition on ethnic conflict: A cherry on the tram, Galleria Il Ponte, in collaboration with the studentate of Rondine (citadel of peace) and the artists Fabio Cresci and Stefano Tondo; in 2008 he curated the Five Easy Pieces exhibition, Spazio D’A, Empoli. In 2010, together with Gianni Pozzi and Susanna Ragionieri, he curates the exhibition and the catalog of the Start Point / Accademia on show and the subsequent edition, with the same curators: Start Point 2011/2012; in 2013 he wrote about: Piero Manzoni, the “drawing” without referent / Giulio Paolini, the perspective without object in Il Disegno After il Disegno. The many lives of an ancient medium (edited by) V. Bruni, S. Socci, F. Speroni, Pisa, 2013 and, the Portrait of the artist as Faun / Pan, in Passeggeri, Galleria La Corte Arte Contemporanea. In 2014, he curates the exhibition and catalog of Alessandra Zurczak at the Galleria Il Ponte, Florence; in 2016 he wrote Destined to Fail? for Stefano Tondo – The Big Bird, Galleria da Mihi, Bern.
Image: Giulio Paolini, Autoritratto, 1968