Chiara Dynys: Lo Stile / The Style

Ca’ Pesaro—International Gallery of Modern Art, Venice, is pleased to present the solo exhibition of Chiara Dynys, Lo Stile / The Style, curated by Alessandro Castiglioni, Chiara Squarcina, Elisabetta Barisoni.

Lo Stile / The Style is the name that Chiara Dynys has given to her most recent work. Presented at Ca’ Pesaro, the exhibition is completely dedicated to new installations that recapitulate the artist’s research and present a series of reflections that reveal a new chapter in a creative essence unfolding uninterrupted in thirty years of accumulated linguistic transformations.

For this reason, Chiara Dynys is effectively one of the most significant artists in Italian contemporary art history. This is evident in her experiments in painting from the 1980s, the conceptual and concrete dialogue with Diane Arbus, Eva Hesse, and Dadamaino, the construction of “monad” spaces that started to occupy walls and spaces, and the use of light, words, and experiments with materials. In the unfolding of this journey, Chiara Dynys explains that: “Light and reflection on materials help me get beyond the idea of style. I do not want my language to be inscribed into a stylistic form: my work has its own consequentiality and obsessiveness in its meaning. I like to use different materials each time so that they are not what makes my quest recognizable. I would like the meaning in each of my works to be what makes my language identifiable. And so I make films, I use projections and various light systems such as LEDs, neon, or lasers, or light-sensitive materials such as glass or mirrors. I thus affirm concepts that are fundamental for me such as the crossing of a material or immaterial threshold, between vision and non-vision, but I eschew the idea of style.”
The exhibition focuses on this elusiveness through style par excellence, the Neoplasticism of Mondrian’s De Stijl. Dynys adds, “More than a tribute to Piet Mondrian, the exhibition is my declaration that the form of the language—even when style is disavowed, as in my work—is of central importance.” Dynys is thus interested in a project of a conceptual nature. We also find aesthetic fragments and ethical references to De Stijl: primary colours, geometrical structures, a plastic relationship among forms. These elements however are the object of a work of appropriation and translation into forms that deny style, in order to reaffirm it.

Chiara Dynys is one of the most relevant contemporary Italian artists. Her work has been studied, collected, and exhibited by many Italian and international institutions. Italian museums that have featured her works include: MART Rovereto (2005, 2011, 2023), the Museo del Novecento in Milan (2012), the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome (2013), Museo Correr in Venice (2019), Villa e Collezione Panza in Varese (2009–21), and Museo MA*GA in Gallarate (2022). Dynys’s works have been featured in exhibitions of 20th- and 21st-century art, placing her oeuvre as a point of reference for studies on the relationship between space, light, and conceptual languages. Prominent among these exhibitions are: Aspectos da Pintura Italiana: do Após—Guerra aos Nossos Dias, Museu Nacional de Belas Artes of Rio de Janeiro and Museu de Arte of São Paulo (1989); Where? identité ailleurs que dans l’identification, Musée d’Art Moderne of Saint-Étienne (1992); La forma del mondo, PAC Milan (2000); Light Art from Artificial Light, ZKM—Museum für Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe (2006); La parola nell’arte, MART, Rovereto (2007); Soundlines of Contemporary Art, ICAE Armenia, Yerevan (2018). Other international venues that have hosted the artist’s works include the Centre d’Art Contemporain of Geneva (1996), CIAC—Centre International d’Art Contemporain of Montreal (1997), the Städtische Galerie in Stuttgart (1999), the Museo Cantonale of Lugano (2001–15), the Rome Quadriennale (1986–05), the Bochum Museum, Bochum (2003), the Kunstmuseum of Bonn (2004), the Wolfsberg Executive Development Center, Wolfsberg (2005), Museo Fortuny, Venice (2023).