Rome: does Parmigianino’ Man with a book remind you of any contemporary art dealer?

None of the contemporary art people that we met last week in Rome, where we went to attend an engaging set of openings – at T293, Gavin Brown and Fondazione Giuliani -, had visited the unmissable two-artist show currently at the Scuderie del Quirinale, which has been during the last years the most serious location in Italy hosting temporary exhibitions of old masters (the show on Filippo Lippi and Sandro Botticelli hosted here in 2011 was indeed memorable). Despite a hundred of works of art by brilliant artists such as Correggio and Parmigianino are currently on display – on loan from all the main museums of the world –, and despite the three recently discovered drawings by Parmigianino presented to the public for the first time, we couldn’t find anyone to share our impressions with about, for instance, the thought-provoking format chosen by the exhibition’s curator, Professor David Ekserdjian, who thanks to this show accomplished putting Correggio and Parmigianino side by side for the first time ever. Was it just bad luck?

 

Perhaps it was, for in Rome it would be quite hard avoiding history. And after all, a printed copy of a mind blowing painting from 1505 is also on display in the current version of The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things, an exhibition began in 2013 by the Turner Prize winner Mark Lackey as a commission from the Hayward Touring. In summer 2015 also Kunsthalle Basel hosted a version of this project, under the title UniAddDumThs. In this case the project’s introductory text presented it as an “ambiguous” exhibition the artist both curated and authored. As we were saying, currently this same project is on display at Sant’Andrea de Schapis, the de-consecrated church that New York-based dealer Gavin Brown has bought last year in Rome, in the area of Trastevere, where at the beginning of his career he was co-running a gallery with fellow dealers Franco Noero and Toby Webster.

 

UniAddDumThs basically consists of a selection of objects based on the contents of Leckey’s personal collection of digital images, that are gathered into folders named by the artist “man”, “machine” and “animal”. Originally the exhibition’s organizers were asked by the artist/curator to locate, borrow or acquire these objects wherever they were.

 

Among the objects on display we have spotted a video by Jordan Walfson, a concrete radio by Isa Genzen (machines), the giant rocking phallus featured in the film A Clockwork Orange (men), a picture by Elad Lassry, a sculpture by Louise Bourgeois (animals), just to name a few. Among them, in the “animal” section, there is also a copy of the well known Forest Fire by Piero di Cosimo, a canvas which is part of a series that the Florentine artist painted for the merchant Francesco del Pugliese. It was recently exhibited in the memorable retrospective that the National Gallery of Art in Washington dedicated to Piero di Cosimo. Needless to say that being able to recognize the painting and its author made us feel good, and as soon as we realized it we also started thinking that probably that was exactly how Leceky expected us to feel. The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things may also be regarded as a process of identification testing the beholder’s confidence in his own knowledge.

 

Just a few steps away from Sant’Andrea de Schapis, proving Trastevere’s ambition to become a cool contemporary art neighbourhood (other galleries are expected to pop up here soon), is the new space of T293, which is an inspiring former metal supply kept almost in its original conditions – including the beautiful office, likely from the late Fifties. Also in this case the exhibition is strictly related to the past. The objects and images presented by David Maliković mirror the artist’s studio and engage the viewers with a mild deja vu feeling. The feeling is directly generated by a silent relation between the real “fragments” of the studio (from the wooden floor to the sketches on the artist’s working desk) and the images of the studio hanging on the gallery walls, where the fragments are to be spotted in their original context. Again, identification is required. But as soon as one digs into Maliković art practice he discovers that the studio is a recurring subject also for the Croatian artist, who lives and works in Zagreb and started his research about this quite typical subject matter in 2013, while he was based in Amsterdam. As Leckey, Maliković enquires into the problem of the artist’s own identity through the history of the artist himself, which is in fact the attached document to both their exhibitions – in the case of Leckey the secret identity of the artist is represented by three folders on his hard drive.

 

Moreover, likely due to a meaningful coincidence, also the single piece exhibited by Michael Dean at the Fondazione Giuliani is in fact a re-presentation of a work already existing and therefore part of the history of the artist. In this case the sculpture was originally produced for Dean’s exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds in 2012 and now belongs to the Fondazione Giuliani. The piece, titled “health (Working Title)”, represents a metaphoric flower sexual organ willing to receive, or more properly “be pollinated” by written pages derived from the artist’s previous exhibitions. But even here, under the influence of Dean’s dramatic artistic struggling, we couldn’t find anyone who had paid a visit to the outstanding Correggio’s Danae (easily ascribable to Dean’s sculpture), or to the Man with a book, that would be the most “contemporary” painting that Parmigianino executed in his career for the reason, if for no other, that it could be a portrait of Gavin Brown himself! And it was a pity because, as all these three very talented artists seem to assert with their current Roman episodes, history is a great opportunity to understand ourselves and the others.

June 10, 2016