PIETRO CONSAGRA. SCULPTURE IN RELATION. Works 1947-2004
- carlottaceccarini9
- Jun 3, 2022
- 2 min read
The Mucciaccia Gallery in Rome shows the works of Pietro Consagra from 25th May to 4th August 2022. The exhibition curated by Francesca Pola is not a purely chronological tour, but a key to understanding the artistic imagination of one of the most significant figures on the international art scene of the twentieth century.
Pietro Consagra, sculptor and writer trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo, born in 1920, was, after the war, one of the leading exponents of international abstract art. During his stay in Rome, in fact, he came into contact with the Forma 1 group, coming to sign the theoretical manifesto of the newborn movement with the other members.
During his life Consagra obtained honorary citizenship from the municipality of Matera for having promoted the so-called Matera Charter and participated in ten biennials of Venice where he won the International Grand Prize for Sculpture in 1960. He also received an honorable mention from the Carnegie Institute, the Critics' Award in Brussels and the Gold Medal for Art and Culture from the President of the Italian Republic.
Consagra spent a period of her life in America, in Minneapolis, exhibiting at the Guggenheim Museum and Marlborough Gerson Gallery in New York, achieving worldwide consecration while still alive. The artist was among the first Italians to enter the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington and was the first living contemporary artist to exhibit at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. Today his works can be admired in the largest museums around the world: from the MoMA to the National Gallery in Washington, from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection to the Center Pompidou, from the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia to the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome (among others).
A multifaceted artist who has transformed his style according to the individual periods and places of his life, in which however a certain artistic continuity and linearity is always recognizable. He is inclined to experimentation and reinvention of new forms and plastic figures that highlight the relationship between sculpture, space and the observer. A research based on word and sign, investigated in his writings and transmitted to the large sculptures of the American period, then transported to Europe. The urban-scale sculpture in Largo Santa Susanna in Rome and that in the European Parliament in Strasbourg are emblematic.
Consagra was also a fervent activist in the debate between realism and abstractionism that set fire to the European artistic panorama around the mid-1900s. The Sicilian artist joined the abstractionist faction because he saw in this artistic style a synonym of transgression towards a certain political rhetoric, while retaining the Marxist and formalist pride characteristic of the Forma 1 group. He promoted the idea of the "frontal sculpture", revisited in a political key, based on an investigation linked to matter and color that reached its peak in the architectural dimension and environmental.
Consagra's sculpture is rational and functional, but at the same time full of values and feelings, inextricably linked to man, art and society. An art that is critical of contemporaneity, but with the aim of improving the surrounding world. A research in which humanity in general can see itself reflected, but which certainly arises from the artist's personal experience.
Photos and video made by Carlotta Ceccarini
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