Archives: Eventis

As part of the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, the Malta Pavilion, curated by Keith Sciberras and Jeffrey Uslip, will host a project conceived by the artists Arcangelo Sassolino, Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci and the composer Brian Schembri.

The installation, entitled Diplomazija astuta, is conceived as a contemporary reinterpretation of Caravaggio’s masterpiece, La decollazione di San Giovanni Battista (1608), preserved in the Oratory of the St. John’s Co-Cathedral in La Valletta. The biblical narration intersects with a contemporary work by tracing a line of continuity in which metaphors and causes for reflection intersect in a complex network of references. The spirit that permeates the La Valletta Oratory is re-proposed in the Malta Pavilion by translating the themes present in Caravaggio’s painting into a current context with a strong emotional impact. The spectator is now called to cross a space in which the tragedy and brutality of the bloody killing of St. John are replicated in the present, in a context that combines music and phenomena related to the world of physics. The aim is to convey a fundamental message: to heal the injustices of the past in order to transmit to the future principles of rebirth and safeguarding life.

The initiative is promoted by the Arts Council Malta, under the patronage of the Ministry for The National Heritage, The Arts and Local Government

Valerio Adami was born in Bologna on March 17, 1935. After completing his scientific studies in Milan, where in the meantime the family had moved, he decided to devote himself to painting by entering Felice Carena’s atelier in Venice, followed by the meeting in 1951 with Oskar Kokoschka, then training at the Brera Academy with Achille Funi. In 1952, after his first stay in Paris where he painted Little Bambine in seggiolino and L’asino d’Empoli, he moved to London and, at the invitation of Roland Penrose, exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. In 1962 he married Camilla, with whom he settled in Arona, on Lake Maggiore. Invited to Documenta III in Kassel by Werner Haftmann in 1964, the following year he appeared in the exhibition entitled I massacri privati, Gli omosessuali-Privacy and Le stanze a canocchiale, held in Milan, the city where in 1966 he presented Immagini con associazioni at Galleria Schwarz and at Studio Marconi. His meeting with Ezra Pound in Venice dates back to this period, then his transfer to New York, where he stayed at the Chelsea Hotel: here the large canvases dedicated to hotel rooms, latrines, homosexuals were born. “Toilettes, hotels, massacri privati”, as Adami writes, “are ways of life, the other nervous system when I go out with my camera”.

1968 is the year of some important exhibitions, such as the Venice Biennale, in which Valerio Adami figures with a personal room, and the exhibitions held at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and at the Jewish Museum in New York. In 1969 with the writer Carlos Fuentes, author of the text Lineas para Adami drawn up the year before, he stayed in Mexico and Venezuela, in Caracas, where the Museo de Bellas Artes hosted one of his personal exhibitions. In 1970 he exhibited in Paris at the Galerie Maeght, which since then became the main point of reference for his work, and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris dedicated a major exhibition to him, which was later transferred to Ulm. The feature film he made in 1971, Vacanze nel deserto, was awarded at the Toulon Film Festival.

During his stay in Bavaria in 1974 Valerio Adami published the volume Das Reich-10 Lektionen uber das reich with the German writer Helmut Heissenbuttel. Other important editorial events follow: the book by Marc Le Bot Valerio Adami. Essai sur le formalisme critique, published in 1975, and the essay by Jacques Derrida dedicated to his work, published in the 1977 volume La verité en peinture. In 1979 he stayed in Mexico City on the occasion of an important one-man show held at the Museo de Arte Moderno, which was then transferred to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. In 1980 Italo Calvino is the author of uattro favole d’Esopo per Valerio Adami. In 1981 he settled in the Principality of Monaco, while continuing to travel around Europe, in Madrid and London. He exhibited in 1983 at the Fuji Television Gallery in Tokyo and in 1984 in New York, the year in which he stopped dating his paintings. In December of the following year, the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris dedicated a large retrospective to him curated by Alfred Pacquement, which was later transferred to the Palazzo Reale in Milan; the rich catalogue of works is introduced by Dore Ashton. He join the Board of Directors of the Collège International de Philosophie. From 1986 is the scenography he created in the central square in Geneva for the 450th anniversary of Calvin’s reform, and from 1987 are two monumental pictorial works on the theme of the Viaggio di Perseo for the atrium of the Gare d’Austerltz in Paris. In the same year he travels to the Scandinavian countries where he exhibits in various galleries.

In 1989 he published Le règles du montage and, on the occasion of the bicentenary of the French Revolution, created a large fresco for the façade of the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. In 1990 he presented an anthologic exhibiion at the Ivam Center in Valencia, with texts by Octavio Paz and José Jiménez. For the Park Hyatt Hotel project in Tokyo, designed by architects Kenzo Tange and John Morford, Valerio Adami created four large paintings in 1993. In 1995 the Institut du Dessin was founded. After the vast exhibitions proposed in Florence in Palazzo Medici Riccardi in the spring of 1996 and at the Museum Bochum in Germany in the following autumn, in 1997 he exhibited at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and, presenting Gli Adami di Adami, at the Refettorio delle Stelline in Milan. He creates the poster for the Spoleto Festival for Giancarlo Menotti, which dedicates a personal exhibition to him. In 1998 the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires hosted a large retrospective dedicated to him. A collection of his writings and reflections on art was published in 2000 with the title Sinopie; in Meina, on Lago Maggiore, he creates the European Drawing Foundation.

Edmondo Bacci was born in Venice in 1913. From 1932 to 1937 attended the Venice Academy of Fine Arts, a student of Virgilio Guidi and Guido Cadorin. Since 1934 Bacci participated in the collective exhibitions of the Opera Bevilacqua La Masa and in the initiatives organized at the Piccola Galleria in Venice, where the avant-garde artists of the moment found hospitality. In these years he began a friedship with gallery owner Carlo Cardazzo who, with his brother Renato, directed the Galleria del Cavallino. It was Cardazzo in May 1945 who hosted his first solo exhibition. Marghera, the focal point of the post-war economic rebirth, and the suggestions offered by the light of the lagoon filtered by the metal sheets and fumes from the smokestacks, are the inspirations that Bacci transfers to “Cantieri” and “Fabbriche,” works executed around 1950, in which the artist matures the spatial function of color destined to become the protagonist in his later works. His first participation in the Venice Biennale was in 1948, where Edmondo Bacci would return consistently until 1958, the year of his solo show.
In 1952 the Cavallino Gallery hosted the first manifestations of the Venetian Spatialism group, a movement that Bacci would join in September 1953.
The pictorial reflections of the moment saw the gradual abandonment of the sign and structure already peculiar to the “Factories” to give way to a new expressive intensity of color that would lead the artist to create the cycles of the “Events” and the “Dawns.”
In the mid-1950s Edmondo Bacci met Peggy Guggenheim, Tancredi’s collector as well as a friend of Giuseppe Santomaso and Emilio Vedova, who would become his fervent supporter. After his exhibition at the Galleria del Cavallino in 1956, the following year he held an important solo show in the United States, at the Seventy-Five Gallery in New York at which numerous works entered important American collections, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. He then participates in various space movement group shows, including Espacialismo at Galeria Bonino in Buenos Aires in 1956.
Nel In 1957 Edmondo Bacci exhibited at the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan, at the Galleria d’Arte Selecta in Rome; he also participated in the exhibition Between Space and Earth at the Marlborough Gallery in London. Later he participated in numerous exhibitions in Europe and the United States: in 1961 at the Drian Gallery in London and Galerie 59 in Aschaffenburg, Germany; in 1962 at the Frank Perls Gallery in Beverly Hills; in 1963 at the Neue Galerie in Graz. The following year he appeared at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh and in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London. Between 1965 and 1966 Bacci exhibited at the Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, and at the headquarters of the Renaissance Society, Chicago. In 1974 Edmondo Bacci obtained the chair of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Venice, which he held until his death. Of importance is the 2023 anthological exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.

Giacomo Balla was born in Turin in 1871. In about 1891 he frequented for some months the Albertina Academy, until 1895, when he and his mother moved to Rome where he made friends with Duilio Cambellotti and Serafino Macchiati. He painted in a Divisionist manner with a social bent similar to that of Morebelli and Pellizza. He was interested in the world of marginalised people and took part in the activities of the Scuola della Campagna Romana together with Giovanni Cena. After having spent seven months in Paris in 1900, he returned to Rome. His studio in Via Porpora was a meeting point for Severini and Boccioni. In 1903 he took part for the first time in the Venice Biennale, and in 1909 exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, and the Salon in Odessa.

In 1910 Giacomo Balla co-signed, together with Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo and Severini, the Manifesto dei pittori futuristi and La pittura futurista – Manifesto tecnico. Between 1910 and 1912 Balla inquired deeply into the theme of movement, in works such as Bambina che corre sul balcone (Civica Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan), Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio (Goodyear collection, Buffalo), Velocità d’automobile (Museum of Modern Art, New York).

In his series Compenetrazioni iridescenti (1912-1914) the study of the dynamic function of the decomposition of light is rendered through abstract compositions, based on the interlocking of triangular forms. In 1912, the year in which Giacomo Balla decorated the home of Lowenstein in Düsseldorf, he took part in the exhibitions of the Futurist group in Rome, Rotterdam, Berlin, and Florence. In 1913 he auctioned off all his figurative works, saying “Balla is dead. Here we are selling the works of the late Balla”. In 1914 he began to compose “words in freedom” and took part in the Futurist group’s interventionist activities. He published the manifesto Il Vestito Antineutrale.

In 1915 he and Marinetti were arrested. Together with Depero he published the Ricostruzione futurista dell’Universo manifesto which promoted Marinetti’s idea of art works as “presence”, “object”, and “action”. This marked the beginning of a period of sculptural researches with various materials (Linea di velocità + paesaggio, bronze relief, 1914). Again in 1915 Giacomo Balla held an important solo show in Rome in the Angelelli room. In 1916 he co-signed, together with Marinetti, Corra, Settimelli and Ginna, the Manifesto della cinematografia futurista. He collaborated with the Florentine Futurist magazine L’Italia Futurista and was involved as author and actor in the film Vita Futurista. In 1917, for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in the Constanzi theatre in Rome, the kinetic-light scenery for Stravinsky’s Feu d’artifice. In 1918 he held a solo show at the Casa d’Arte Bragaglia in Rome and, in its catalogue, published the Manifesto del colore. In 1919 he took part in the Grande Esposizione Nazionale Futurista at the Galleria Centrale in Palazzo Cova, Milan. In 1920 he became part of the editorial board of the Roma Futurista magazine.

In 1920-1921 he participated in the Exposition Internationale d’Art Moderne in Geneva, and in two other shows of the Futurist group in Paris and Prague. In 1921 he created the decoration and furnishing for Bal Tik-Tak, a Futurist-style ballroom. In the 1920s he took part in most of the Futurist exhibitions: Macerata in 1922; Turin, Rome, the third Rome Biennale, and New York in 1925; the Venice Biennale and Boston in 1926; Bologna, Turin, Palermo, and Milan in 1927; Imola and Turin in 1928; Fiuggi, Rome, Milan, and Paris in 1929; the Venice Biennale in 1930; the Rome Quadriennale in 1931; and again in Rome in 1932. In 1925 he took part, together with Depero and Prampolini, in the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. In 1926 he collaborated with the Roman newspaper L’Impero and, in 1927, with Vetrina Futurista. In 1929, together with Benedetta, Depero, Dottori, Fillia, Marinetti, Prampolini, Somenzi and Tato, he co-signed the Manifesto dell’Aeropittura.

In 1937, the year after his participation in the Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition in New York, he broke polemically with Futurism and stated that “pure art is to be found in absolute realism, without which one falls back into decorative and ornamental forms”. From 1948 onwards he returned to Futurist painting. He held solo shows with Futurist works in Rome, Milan, and at the Rome Quadriennale in 1951; Florence in 1952; New York in 1954; Rome in 1956; and Paris, Milan, Madison (U.S.A.), and Turin in 1957. Giacomo Balla died in Rome on March 1st, 1958.

Afro Basaldella, born in Udine in 1912, is one of the best-known abstract Italian painters, He began exhibiting in Milan during the ‘30s in the same period that his brother, Mirko, came to be known as a sculptor. In 1934 he moved to Rome, coming into contact with the city’s artists. He took part in national and international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale in 1936.

After the second world war his interest in abstraction became more evident. In 1949 he met Catherine Viviano who invited him to exhibit in her gallery in New York. In this period his relationship with the American scene became closer. In the same year the Director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Andrew Ritchie, wrote to him about Patrick Kelleher’s presentation of his works at the museum. In 1950 he lived in the United States for eight months while preparing an exhibition at the Catherine Viviano Gallery in New York, where he returned to exhibit several times in the following years (the show in 1955 was particularly appreciated).

For the American critics Afro interpreted the Italian tradition in a contemporary abstract way, a result of his painterly researches into colour-harmony. In 1955 he was member of the awards jury for the “International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting” in Pittsburgh (the cover of the catalogue reproduced an Afro painting), and in the 1958 edition he won the second prize. Having returned to Italy, where he continued to exhibit at the Venice Biennale together with the so-called “Gruppo degli Otto” (Group of Eight Painters), he held a solo show in 1956, with a catalogue introduction by Andrew C. Ritchie.

In this period he established a close friendship with Alberto Burri, an artist with whom for a long period he shared a dialectical interest in art experimentation. Il giardino della speranza is the title of a large-scale wall painting undertaken in the UNESCO building in Paris in 1958, a work which introduced Afro to the French scene; this interest in him was confirmed by his solo show in the Galerie de France in 1961. Again in 1961, James Johnson Sweeney devoted a monograph to his work since 1950. In 1966 Syd Solomon invited him to teach at the New College Fine Arts Institute of Sarasota (Florida), and then to take part in an exhibition together with six artists, including Philip Guston, Solomon, and Marca-Relli. His painting during the ‘70s was concerned with abstract compositions with a more geometrical linear structure and clear, sharp, coloured backgrounds. After the death of his brother Mirko in 1969, Afro had various health problems.

The 1970s were characterized by an increased output of graphics and by his waning interest in politics and participating in exhibitions. He died in Zurich in 1976.