Je ne regrette rien
35th ANNIVERSARY OF THE GALLERY
Studio la Città
Via Dietro Filippini 2 · 37121 Verona · Italy
OPENING 21st MAY 2005
Stuart Arends Pierpaolo Calzolai Luigi Carboni Lawrence Carroll Enrico Castellani Max Cole Gianni Colombo Robyn Denny Ulrich Erben Lucio Fontana Alberto Garutti Giorgio Griffa Herbert Hamak Jacob Hashimoto Emil Lukas Julia Mangold Piero Manzoni Mirco Marchelli Hiroyuki Masuyama Giulio Paolini Michelangelo Pistoletto Steve Roden Ross Rudel Mario Schifano Jonathan Seliger David Simpson Richard Smith Ettore Spalletti
OPENING 21st MAY 2005
Studio la Città opened in Verona in November 1969. A small group of English artists, together with such of their Italian contemporaries as Griffa, Aricò, Battaglia and Verna, marked the gallery’s activity in the early seventies. But these were only the next stage in a programme that had begun with such artists as Gianni Colombo, Mario Schifano, and above all, Lucio Fontana. Then, with the increased security of a widening reputation, it began to explore the art of other European countries and of America. And this still lies at the heart of the gallery’s activity: its location in Verona has certainly never limited its outward-looking vocation. But equally at its heart is a constant return to the reference points of key developments in modern and contemporary Italian art: Fontana, of course, but also Manzoni, Castellani, Paolini, Calzolari, Spalletti and others.
A view of the second of the two shows marking the gallery’s 35-year activity will reveal the continuation of a path whose beginnings have just been sketched and, while they will also reveal that Studio la Città never had a rigid, preconceived plan, they will show quite clearly the logical sensitivity behind its choices. Here are artists who do not shout, who are more intimist than not: Giorgio Griffa, for example, with his diaphanous stripes of colour on raw open-weave canvas, or Herbert Hamak who creates works in which sculpture and painting are indissolubly one or, again, the subtle, conceptual beauty of Alberto Garrutti or, in more recent times, Steve Roden with a variegated work that is always humble and subtle. These are artists who, like the others in the show, mysteriously enlarge our horizons. Obviously they will not often be visually ‘in harmony’. They frequently differ as much in their strategies as in their means. And yet their sensibilities overlap. Both the reasons behind the choice of these and the many other artists seen in the gallery in the past and in the future, and the relationship between the works and the various artists themselves, are best compared to the choreographic movements of a ballet rather than to the flight of an arrow. Who knows how things will seem in 35 years’ time?
