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From Bergamo to Brescia, Italian Capitals of Culture 2023, and Rome to San Francisco: this autumn 2023 is marked by major contemporary art exhibitions worldwide.
Autumn 2023 and the contemporary art exhibitions to see!
Coming back after the holidays can be difficult, so we decided to share with you 5 contemporary art exhibitions that will brighten up your autumn days and your return to everyday life.
David LaChapelle per Ceruti - Brescia
Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo, Brescia. Until 10th November 2023.
David LaChapelle for Giacomo Ceruti. Nomad in a Beautiful Land is a photographic exhibition presenting an unpublished work by the famous American artist David Lachapelle for Brescia and inspired by the pauper Giacomo Ceruti's production.
The Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo, the museum that preserves the highest number of Ceruti's works in the world, hosts this shot to narrate, through a new and contemporary language, the rooms usually dedicated to the painter of the last. Together with the Jesus is My Homeboy series of 2003, LaChapelle's unique photography insinuates itself into the dense folds of the present to provide an attentive and conscious interpretation of marginality: an ode to social decadence.
The exhibition aims at structuring both an exhibition and itinerant architecture, in which the classical universe of Giacomo Ceruti meets the imagery of David LaChapelle. The intention is to create a museum synergy between Fondazione Brescia Musei and the Getty Center that sees Ceruti's works about pauperism land in Los Angeles,
Classical art and photography open up to dialogue, bringing into play their formal differences to shake up a contemporaneity plagued by relational aridity. Gated Community, shot in Los Angeles in December 2022, represents an ideological staging of the sacred and the profane, in which a very long tent city, a shelter for the homeless, crowds the city's pavements, tinged with Hollywood opulence.
Yayoi Kusama Infinito Presente - Bergamo
Palazzo della Ragione, Bergamo, until 14th January 2024.
From 17 November 2023 to 14 January 2024, Palazzo della Ragione in Bergamo will be the theatre of an extraordinary artistic and cultural operation.
Yayoi Kusama's exhibition will bring Fireflies on the Water, one of her most iconic Infinity Mirror Rooms, part of the Whitney Museum’s collection of American Art in New York.
The exhibition is composed of an introductory path that delves into Yayoi Kusama's research through poems, films, and documentation, creating a physical and digital sharing space of the experience and allowing visitors to enter the famous Japanese artist's imagery from various points of view.
At the center of Fireflies on the Water is a room-sized installation designed to be enjoyed in solitude, one person at a time. The work consists of a room lined with mirrors on all sides; in the center of the room, there is a pool of water, conveying a sense of stillness, in which a pier-like viewing platform and 150 small lights hanging from the ceiling that, as the title suggests, look like fireflies.
These elements create a dazzling effect of direct light’s reflection, emanating from the mirrors and the water’s surface together. The space appears infinite, without a top or bottom, beginning or end. Similarly to Yayoi Kusama's early installations, including the Infinity Mirror Room (1965), Fireflies on the Water embodies an almost hallucinatory approach to reality. Although linked to the artist's mythology and the process of therapeutic work, this work also refers to sources as varied as the myth of Narcissus and Kusama's native Japanese landscape.
Helmut Newton. Legacy - Rome
Museo dell’Ara Pacis, Rome, until 3rd March 2024.
In agreement with the Newton Foundation, Helmut Newton, the exhibition Legacy in Rome features around 250 photographs by the American artist.
Alongside the most iconic images are many previously unseen works illustrating lesser-known aspects of his works and his creative process, revealed through Polaroids and contact sheets.
The exhibition traces the entire career of one of the most loved and discussed photographers of all time. Alongside the shots that have made history, and appeared on the most important covers of fashion magazines, a corpus of previously unpublished shots reveals lesser-known aspects of Newton's work. A specific focus dedicated to fashion shoots considered revolutionary at the time, such as the series inspired by the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Francois Truffaut, and Federico Fellini. Polaroids, contact prints, special publications, and archive materials allow the visitor to enter the heart of Helmut Newton's creative process.
Chronological chapters recount the different stages of the photographer's life and career, from his beginnings to his last years of production, with images that have become part of our visual and collective memory, such as the Big Nudes series. Until the end, Newton continued to enchant and provoke the public with his complex work on femininity, challenging all attempts to categorize women for more than six decades. The protagonists of his shots are subjects who have full awareness of their bodies, subtle irony, and a defiant attitude towards the other, without ever falling into vulgarity or banality.
The exhibition starts in the 1940s in Australia, continuing lately through the 1950s in Europe, the 1960s in France, the 1970s in the United States, and the 1980s between Monte Carlo and Los Angeles, up to the numerous shoots around the world in the 1990s and the last period of his career.
Chagall. Il colore dei sogni - Mestre
Centro Culturale Candiani, until 13th February 2024.
In Chagall. Il colore dei sogni (The Colour of Dreams) will be shown masterpieces conserved at Ca' Pesaro, flanked in each section by important and timely works by Chagall from prestigious international collections.
Thanks to loans from the Albertina in Vienna, the Musée National Marc Chagall in Nice, the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Chagall becomes a red thread linking works and artists who have felt their production in similar terms to his, or who have taken inspiration from him to develop their art in the most diverse directions.
Chagall's fantastic journey takes place through 20th-century art split into six sections. The fourth section focuses on themes dear to Chagall, love, and color. Il Colore dei Sogni places the Russian master's research alongside European expressionism. Moreover, a large section of the exhibition is devoted to religious works, specifically Marc Chagall's illustrations for the Bible commissioned by Ambroise Vollard.
Takashi Murakami - San Francisco
Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, until 12th February 2024.
Takashi Murakami is the Japanese artist's first solo exhibition in San Francisco. The internationally recognized artist is also a leading figure in global pop culture, whose influence extends to fashion, consumer products, curating, and entertainment. With a vibrant, colorful style and a pop sensibility that draws inspiration from anime and manga, Murakami's accessible and entertaining creations offer much more than meets the eye: beneath the surface of his work lies a nuanced examination of human behavior, informed by historical and art-historical references and a wry sense of humor.
In Murakami’s exhibition Monsterized, the artist uses monsters as a central motif to address the complicated nature of the world around us. The artist's recent works suggest that our rapidly changing and increasingly digital landscape is populated by monsters, many created by men. Between scary and funny, these monsters embody the forces and behaviors that threaten and haunt us, as well as those that offer us diversions and escape from chaos. Several new works created for this exhibition see Murakami responding to a social environment marked by a global pandemic and a shift towards virtual interaction. Paintings of distorted figures reflect the inflated egos of individuals relentlessly promoting themselves on social media, while works recording the artist's creation of NFT, including avatars, look optimistically towards a digitally liberated future.
"The visual DNA of Murakami's characters originates from centuries-old Japanese art styles, such as Buddhist’s depiction of arhats and Taoist immortals as lost beings with strange features, bulging eyes, and bared teeth. To these revered historical sources, Murakami adds the technicolor palette, whimsical expressions and eclectic mix of motifs that have become his trademark" - Laura W. Allen, exhibition curator.
