Allan Kaprow. I Will Always Be A Painter – Of Sorts. Drawings, Paintings, Happenings, Environments

Exhibition Hours

The Museo Novecento announces the great anthology dedicated to Allan Kaprow (Atlantic City, 1927 – Encinitas, 2006) father of Environments and Happenings, a multifaceted and tireless artist, who during his intense career has dealt with the most diverse media. The exhibition, ALLAN KAPROW. I will always be a painter – of sorts, curated by Sergio Risaliti and Barry Rosen, promoted by the Municipality of Florence, created in collaboration with Allan Kaprow Estate and Hauser & Wirth, opens to the public on February 20 and presents for the first time in Italy a corpus of about forty works on paper and canvas representing the artist’s debut.

In order to reconstruct the artist’s creative parable, the Museo Novecento traces a backward path within his research, which opens with the reinvention of two emblematic works – FLUIDS (1967) on the ground floor conceived by the artists Davide D ‘ Amelio, Anna Dormio, Bekhbaatar Enkthur, Esma Ilter, Giulia Poppi, Negar Sh, currently in residence at the Manifattura Tabacchi, and WORDS (1962) on the first floor designed by Dania Menafra, who is confronted with the creation of desire and consent in society digital dominated by emotional marketing – through his intense graphic and editorial production, the videos and actions of the seventies (exhibited in the Cinema room), ending with the drawings and paintings.

These last rooms collect a corpus of about forty works (20 paintings and 19 drawings), exhibited for the first time in Italy, which shed light on the performative implications of these early works on paper and canvas. Thanks to the experience of Action Painting, Kaprow understood how a painting could involve the viewer to the point of giving the impression of leaving the wall and entering real space. These works lay the foundations for a new conception of a work of art that opens up to a radical blend of art and life, art and urban space, art and theater.
On the occasion of the exhibition, the artists Jacopo Miliani and Elena Mazzi were invited to design two further reinventions of FLUIDS which will take place outside the Museum respectively on 4 April in some squares in the historic center and on 1 May at the Manifattura Tabacchi.

Under the museum’s Renaissance loggia, already used for site-specific interventions around the theme of language, Dania Menafra designed WOM!, her reinvention of the Words environment.
WOM!, acronym for Word of Mouth, is the spontaneous word of mouth that, through old and new media, runs quickly from mouth to mouth. Word of mouth is also one of the means of emotional marketing strategies most used by companies and political leaders on social networks to create an emotional bond with users-consumers. It is a business model that, by leveraging the creative energies stimulated by emotions and that sense of belonging defined as the community effect, aims to trigger viral contents that act as catalysts of consumption and loyalty to direct collective consensus: rivers are born of words where everything is lawful, as long as we talk about it.

WOM! it consists of a few hundred phrases, words and emoticons extrapolated from the public profiles of commercial brands. Printed as posters and distributed along the loggia, they can be picked up and pasted on the walls to create new associations. Just as marketing focuses on the active role of the user-consumer, so the visitor is invited to interact with the sentences in their own way, in a game of identity and loss of meaning, where the encounter between language and public reveals its potential, leaving room for an increasingly free and aware creativity.

Dania Menafra (Siena, 1989) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, graduating in 2015/2016 in Visual Arts and New Expressive Languages, Graphics. She worked as a graphic designer for: Graphic Office of the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, 40th International Art Site of Montepulciano (Siena), Birra Amiata (Siena), Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art (Prato), Foundation Palazzo Strozzi (Florence), The screen of art Film Festival (Florence), Villa Romana (Florence), Franco Zeffirelli Foundation (Florence), La Progressiva (Florence), Cultural Association Hidden City (Florence), Manifattura Tabacchi (Florence), Winter Museum (Siena), Novecento Museum (Florence).

FOLD FLUIDS is the reinvention conceived by Davide D’Amelio, Anna Dormio, Bekhbaatar Enkthur, Esma Ilter, Giulia Poppi, Negar Sh, the six young artists who are currently carrying out a residency at the Manifattura Tabacchi in Florence. For three months the museum public will be able to participate in the construction of a version of FLUIDS made no longer with blocks of ice but with sheets of paper folded according to the origami technique. In the hands of the visitors each sheet is transformed into a brick of paper that will build a parallelepiped of 9 x 2.5 meters, respecting the original dimensions of the first version of FLUIDS. In Italian popular culture it is customary to say “to make a house of cards” to allude to an enterprise that is doomed to fail, but it is in the failure, in the questioning and in the constant destruction that new possibilities for reorganization of the structures open up. they are social, economic or political.

Bekhbaatar Enkhtur (Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, 1994); Davide D’Amelio (Termoli, 1990); Anna Dormio (Putignano, 1994); Esma İlter (Marmara Eregli, Turchia, 1993); Negar Sh (Theran, Iran, 1989); Giulia Poppi (Modena, 1992).