VENICE - The uniqueness of the artistic figure, in the name of the strength of the gesture and emotional commitment also in a political and social key, through the plurality of techniques of the complex world of graphic work that continuously accompanies the path of Emilio Vedova from the early sixties until his death in 2006. The exhibition "Emilio Vedova. Tempo Inciso" promoted by the Foundation named after the artist and his wife Annabianca, in the two locations at the Magazzino del Sale and at the Vedova alle Zattere space, in Venice, from 3 September to 26 November.
An exhibition commissioned by the president Alfredo Bianchini and curated by Fabrizio Gazzarri, collaborator for decades of the artist, historical and direct memory of the birth of many pictorial and graphic cycles, who died suddenly two months ago. Bianchini underlined the importance of graphics in Vedova's work in its most diverse technical expressions - from engraving to screen printing, from lithography to collage - always in the name of experimentation and the use of "secret" procedures. It has been recalled that often in the path of an artist the graphic work is seen as a sort of "minor art". "For Vedova - said the president of the Foundation - it was not so: he dedicated himself to graphics for most of his life. There he expressed energy and strength." The same emotional and ethical components, with the same care and attention to quality and stylistic rendering, which have characterized his pictorial cycles, sculptures, drawings.
Corrado Albicocco, who since the late seventies has printed many of the artist's graphic cycles, recalled that once a print had been discarded because there was one dot too many that only Vedova had seen: "He was hard, fussy, scrupulous".
The exhibition itinerary starts at the Magazzino del Sale from the first black and white engraving works of the sixties, always marked by extensive pictorial and written gestures. A sort of response, of emotional opposition in the sign of a new artistic experimentation, to the advent of pop art, with the Golden Lion of the Biennale in Rauschenberg in 1964. Other works followed until the beginning of the new millennium, not in the framework of a chronological or thematic road, but rather through examples, largely unpublished, of the different techniques touched by the artist, such as the lithoplurime and the seriplurime of the seventies in three dimensions. All works, on closer inspection, that express his "communicative urgency", his being a man-artist protagonist of his time. In addition to works arranged on tables, there are those in motion thanks to the Machina Robotica designed by Renzo Piano. It will be an opportunity for the visitor to come into almost contact with the various cycles that will alternate around the room according to a precise time limit.
The same immersive character will mark the visit of the Spazio Vedova where next to the works on the walls there will be images and videos that show the artist at work. Through vintage films it will be like entering Vedova's studio and ideally taking part in her alchemy on the plates. The video setting was curated by Tomaso Pessina.
In the catalogue, the exciting "critical story" by Gazzarri, which emphasizes, among other things, that Vedova's "artistic conception did not contemplate the logic of entertainment" or "the economic ones" that seducedThey deform and deform the cultural horizon of the art system, but "he pursued with ever renewed energy the decisive contact between necessity, knowledge and language". In this, the graphic work also played the role of irreplaceable expressive tool.
In the Foundation's promotion of Vedova's work, it was also announced that an exhibition with a selection of her works will be inaugurated in Seoul on 2 November. Bianchini, in this regard, stressed that art in this world moment of "clash of situations", as the artist would have said, can, can, "always be a moment of rapprochement and peace for humanity".
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