Sculptor, set designer, eclectic artist and among the most representative of Arte Povera: to Pino Pascali and the legacy of his brief career, from tomorrow until 23 September the Prada Foundation is dedicating a large retrospective curated by Mark Godfrey.
Conceived by 2x4, the exhibition itinerary includes 49 works from Italian and international museums and private collections.
Born in Bari in 1935, Pascali moved to Rome in 1955 to study set design at the Academy of Fine Arts. He worked as an assistant set designer in Rai and collaborated as a designer and set designer for cinema and advertising.
In 1965 he held his first solo exhibition at the Galleria La Tartaruga in Rome, and in 1968 he died after a motorbike accident, at the age of thirty-two, in the same year as his monographic presentation at the Venice Art Biennale.
Despite his short career, Pascali - as emerges from the Milanese retrospective - contributed significantly to the developments of the post-World War II art scene.
"He used natural elements such as earth and water together with building materials such as eternit, and - recalls Mark Godfrey - he divided his seas and fields into modular units.
He brought new consumer products and synthetic fabrics into the studio to create animals , traps and bridges".
But "if the complexity of his approach to sculpture is indisputable", for the curator "the factor that makes his artistic practice so brilliant and original is another: Pascali is an artist who is always current because he was an exhibitionist".
According to Godfrey, Pascali "understood that postwar artists needed to devote as much energy to exhibiting as they did to refining works in the studio."
Being an exhibitionist meant "first of all creating engaging albeit temporary environments with one's works, environments that were more than the sum of their parts" and "procuring as many exhibition opportunities as possible and taking control of them".
The exhibitionist also "recognized the importance of having images of the exhibition before and after the installation" and "had to infuse new life into his work for each exhibition, and above all he had to radically change the approach to the realization of each exhibition project".
To delve deeper into the innovative nature of Pascali's work, the first section of the exhibition project delves into how the artist created imaginary environments for his five solo exhibitions, without simply selecting works from his studio.
The second section is dedicated to natural and industrial materials, such as canvas, dye, earth, eternit, synthetic fur, steel wool, foam rubber, car parts, hay and brushes, with key works such as Sinking Boat (1966), Fields plowed and irrigation canals (1967) and The Arch of Ulysses (1968).
The third part includes some of his best-known works, such as Reconstruction of the dinosaur (1966), 1 cubic meter of earth (1967), 9 m2 of puddles (1967) and River with triple mouth (1967), in dialogue with works by artists such as Alighiero Boetti and Michelangelo Pistoletto.
In closing, historical photos and videos of Pascali together with his sculptures.
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