L'AQUILA - Sunday 2 April opens the new season of MAXXI L'Aquila to the public with a double solo show entitled 'visible-invisible' dedicated to Marisa Merz and Shilpa Gupta, two of the most recognized artists on the international scene.
Two worlds, two stories, two eras that meet in the halls of Palazzo Ardinghelli, in the works of two women born half a century apart in places as distant as Italy and India.
The artistic practice of Marisa Merz (1926-2019), Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2013, explores the intimate, domestic and private dimension with sculptures, installations and drawings in a delicate, fragile and subtle poetics like plots of copper.
The works of Shilpa Gupta (Mumbai, 1976) lead to a further reflection on the present, in particular on social issues and cultural identities.
The title of the exhibition - open to the public until 1 October 2023 - is inspired by the famous unfinished text by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 'The Visible and the Invisible', published posthumously in 1964.
The double solo show welcomes about 50 works by the two artists, creating a dialogue between their works suspended in time and space, which cancels distances and gives them new perspectives and meanings.
Eastern and Western cultures meet and confront each other in the baroque halls of the museum which favor the intimate and private dimension, in a tense and precise conversation on the themes of the visible and the invisible, the said and the unsaid, the concrete and the abstract.
An exhibition created by the National Museum of XXI Century Arts in collaboration with the Merz Foundation and the Galleria Continua.
(HANDLE).