Exhibitions
The exhibition presents 36 lithographs by Denis Auguste Marie Raffet (1804-1860), collected in the album called Souvenirs d’Italie. Expédition de Rome , to illustrate the various stages of the French expedition to Rome in 1849.
The project MACROwall: Eighties are Back! wants to reinterpret Italian art of the Eighties thorough a cycle of exhibitions featuring 10 artists whose different researches have characterized the production of the decade. Each artist is invited to display on the same wall two of his most representative works, an “historical” one and a more recent one, in order to allow the public to rediscover the vitality of art forms in the last years. The works are accompanied by critical reviews coming from two different generations: the younger art critic will interpret the “historical” work and vice versa.
Again on display the popular watercolours of Ettore Roelser Franz, this exhibition provides an opportunity to admire 111 of the 119 watercolours that make up the “Picturesque Rome. Memories of an era that is disappearing” series, better known as “Vanished Rome”.
A documentary exhibition dedicated to the Italian police movies of the Seventies.
The exhibition, which is curated by Federica Pirani and presents a selection of 53 large oil paintings painted between 2007 and 2010, examines the pictorial research on the portrait and on landscape conducted by Tullio Pericoli, revealing lesser known aspects of this popular illustrator.
An exhibition of video interviews recorded around the globe showing women and men talking about universal themes such as philosophy and life experiences.
The exhibition, organized on the occasion of the celebration of 90 years of friendship between the Knights of Columbus and the city of Rome, traces through photographs, portraits, documents and newspaper articles, the history of the Catholic mutual aid society “Knights of Columbus”, which was founded on October 2 1881 by Father Michael J. McGivney.
MACRO will dedicate one of its large galleries to a solo show from the young American artist Aaron Young (San Francisco, California, 1972), curated by Costanza Paissan. Called upon to create a site-specific installation, Young re-imagined the exhibition space by infusing it with urban ambience and exposing how the diverse stories and languages of a city can coexist.
The four videos in the show were shot in a variety of locations from the Palace of Versailles to a frozen lake in New York State. The camera is constantly being flipped upside down and kicked around by the artist until it is fully destroyed. The resulting footage creates a melange of sights and sounds, catching the viewer off-guard and upsetting his sense of space. One of the videos, created specially for this exhibition presents a liberal and disillusioned interpretation of Rome’s classical image and that of a symbolic monument, the Colosseum.
A great master of contemporary art, rethinks MACRO’s galleries, absorbing visitors into a complete physical and psychological experience pulsing with energy.
In a project specifically created for MACRO, Gilberto Zorio turns one of the Museum’s galleries into a huge work, fully involving visitors. As is so often the case, he has used signs and traces of unusual and diverse materials that are both unstable and unpredictable, in order to involve the identity of the space in constant modification. The result is a place laden with mystery and atavistic symbols, which are always elements of his investigations. These include the five-pointed star, a cosmic image he has made in a whole variety of materials in the past (terracotta, copper, leather, incandescent wire, laser beams, crystal, parchment, and oxy-hydrogen flame burns), which the artist introduces here as a huge horizontal sign. In its constant and sudden alternation of light and dark, it gives us a new experience, transforming our visual perception of space and symbols.
MACRO inaugurates the entrance to its new wing with a site specific installation by Jacob Hashimoto. Silence Still Governs Our Consciousness creates a floating realm which anticipates the journey from MACRO’s present to its future.
Hashimoto conceived this “cloud of 7000 kites” specifically for MACRO’s new exhibition gallery. The work fills the room like a “diaphanous canopy” evoking in its spectators the sensation of being “surrounded by a mist filled forest of kites and strings - a quiet, meditative, sculptural environment.” The piece synthesizes nature and technology to yield a fluid and organic landscape. This encourages meditation and evokes new readings of the gallery: as a void, as space, or as time.
On the second floor of the recently renovated via Reggio Emilia building, a bridge to the Museum’s new wing, is a solo show featuring the Portuguese artist João Louro. It is a world in which nothing is as it seems, a universe where the short-circuit of vision and language creates original expressive pathways.
One of the galleries of the Museum is home to My Dark Places, a solo show featuring the work of Portuguese artist João Louro (born in 1963 in Lisbon), curated by Luca Massimo Barbero. Works never seen before and specifically created for this show will be shown as part of Louro’s Blind Images series. The works are inspired by the seemingly antithetical concepts “fear” and “pleasure,” in addition to The Black Dahlia by James Elroy, and works of the Marquis de Sade. The text in the work, featuring phrases taken from textual sources, and the monochromatic scheme ironically and subtly interact with one another in a way that similar to labels or subtitles. The observer doesn’t find a simple explanation or description in the text, but new suggestions, that open the eyes and mind to different, faraway worlds, filled with philosophical and literary citations. A simple color scheme seems almost to condense its meaning and contain unexpected aspects within the text.
Micro, Aureo, Adela is the project MACRO commissioned from Spanish artist Jorge Peris (born in Alzira, Valencia, 1969). Specially realized for this space, the installation is the fruit of Peris recent work. Recreating the environment of a salt mine, Peris turns one of the Museum’s galleries into an extreme ecosystem. Exploring the relationship between salt and water, he brings his audience on a journey into the infinite past.
Jorge Peris consulted with physicists and marine biologists, in order to study the dynamics of the origins of life. The artificial ecosystem which resulted from this research is based on the memory of salt and accompanies the visitor on their journey into the past, according to the rhythms of the golden mean. The formation of the saline stalactites is governed by the Coriolis effect and creates a corridor of time-space continuum, a window onto our ancestral past. The Artemia Salinae are forms of primordial life that have maintained their original characteristics through the millennia, harking back to the origins of life on earth.
The MACRO SPECIAL PROJECTS program, begun in the summer of 2009, brings young artists the possibility of interacting with the Museum’s alternative gallery spaces. Artists such as Francesco Simeti and the Cuoghi Corsello duo took over the open-plan elevator shafts and semi-circular walls in the atrium bringing a new life and meaning to the spaces. The metamorphoses of these spaces continues with Luca Trevisani, breathing new life into Museum’s corridors.
An evolution of Gibbous and Waning, Trevisani’s work Space is a Garden to Cultivate, through its at once organic and artificial forms represents the lunar phases within cosmic space. The images evoke tidal rhythms, astral movements, stellar geometry, and the forces and entities which, determining times and seasons, govern human life. Interested by the influence the moon exerts on individuals, the artist uses industrial PVC surfaces on which he represents forms to evoke the gravitational pull on bodies. Two complimentary images face each other and dialogue in a game of attraction and repulsion, thus generating a celestial choreography based on complimentary, reciprocal, and multiplying points of view.
After the extraordinary response from our visitors, Rome, We Were the Avant-Garde will remain on view for the entirety of the summer exhibition season. This show has managed to cross the boundaries that traditionally divide generations and has opened dialogue with all types of public personalities. MACRO has decided to extend this show in a summer full of cultural activity because the memory of avant-garde Rome is relevant to the city’s interaction with the international community
The exhibition Philip Guston, Roma to be held at the Museo Carlo Bilotti
On display, for the first time in Rome, a selection of works, drawings and archival materials coming from the sculptor’s studio in Trieste, lent by the family of Attilio Selva.
From 22nd April to 5th September, an exhibition of Pio Pullini’s works coming from private collections and from the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna (Municipal Gallery of Modern Art) will be held at the Museo di Roma - Palazzo Braschi.
Percorsi del Novecento romano (20th century art in Rome) presents a selection of about seventy paintings and sculptures, important examples of Italian art and culture of the first half of the Twentieth century.
The five-year project “I Giorni di Roma” (The Days of Rome) opens with a great exhibition of masterpieces of ancient art, coming from the most important European museums, and dating back to the period following the conquest campaigns in Greece (from the end of III century BC to the second half of the 1st century BC). This was one of the most crucial periods for the future cultural and artistic identity of Rome, not only in the Republican age.