In the framework of events planned by the Region Campania to celebrate the Baroque culture, the Department for Cultural Heritage has decided to support the proposal of the museum MADRE to organise a collective exhibition titled “BAROCK – Art, Science, Faith and Technology in the Contemporary Age, open from 12th December until 5th April.
The exhibition, curated by Eduardo Cicelyn and Mario Codognato, aims at exploring the similarities between the cultural themes that seem to characterise the beginning of the new century and those that made the visual imagination of the Baroque period so great and powerful. The purpose of the event is to identify issues and problems that were predominant in the 17th century and that are still distinctive of our time, showing how and which contemporary artists have made the typical themes of the 17th-century Baroque culture once again functional and recognisable. The revolutionary scientific and technological discoveries, which day after day challenge established certainties and habits; the great religious fervour that led to the fundamentalism, to the obscurantism and to the clashes between civilisations with unprecedented slaughters: it appears clear that the disorientation of the contemporary imagination is determined by ideological conflicts and tragic experiences for issues which do not differ much from those that characterised the century of Galileo and of the Counter-Reformation. What the artists featured in the exhibition most obviously have in common with the Baroque masters is the fact that they all use “sensational” images, which aim at striking the senses, at being extreme in their violence, in their sensuality, in their frankness, which do not comply with any category and escape any definition. It is as if art, today as in the 17th century, has to push itself further and further to reinvent a world that has become more uncertain about its various and contradictory and often terrible representations.
On the one side, Barock attempts to interpret the current situation of visual arts in the perspective of a new “sensationalism” that has deep formal and conceptual roots in the 17th century code; while on the other hand it proposes the doubt, through the opposite thesis – in pure Baroque style! – that it is no longer useful nor possible to believe that you can experience such a thing as a work of art as an object offered to our senses and consequently to our ability to reason even in a moral and sentimental way. In other words, the aim is to create a conceptual line by which artists challenge the artificial realism of technologies to propose another type of realism which is full of highly imaginative perspectives, through allegoric tools and devices conceived to unmask the powerlessness of conventional cultural forms and to affirm the (Baroque) possibility to understand and change the world by broadening its sensorial and perceptive borders.
The event is characterised by an exuberant exhibition strategy which involves, besides the third floor which represents the main exhibition space, the additional spaces of the Church of Donnaregina Vecchia, the Project Room, the internal courtyard, the multifunctional room, the terrace, the monumental staircase and finally the museum entrance which hosts the famous work “Heaven” by Damien Hirst, a large tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde.
Twenty-eight artists have been invited: Adel Abdessemed, Micol Assael, Matthew Barney, Domenico Bianchi, Bianco & Valente, Antonio Biasiucci, Karen Cytter, Mircea Cantor, Maurizio Cattelan, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Claire Fontaine, Lara Favaretto, Gilbert & George, Douglas Gordon, Mona Hatoum, Damien Hirst, Anish Kapoor, Jeff Koons, Jannis Kounellis, Shirin Neshat, Carsten Nicolai, Orlan, Philippe Parreno, Giulia Piscitelli, Michal Rovner, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, Sisley Xhafa.
12th December 2009 – 5th April 2010
BAROCK. ART, SCIENCE, FAITH AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE CONTEMPORARY AGE
Madre Museo d’Arte Donna Regina
Via Luigi Settembrini 79
Naples 80139
Tel +39 081 19313016
pellegrini@museomadre.it
www.museomadre.it
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tanya telford - T
Saturday 28 August 2010
i wish id seen this exhibition,