The Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents a great master of italian art.
Homage to Mario Nigro renews the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s commitment to masters of twentieth century Italian art. The exhibition takes place from April 22 to May 21 at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. Gianni Nigro, president of the Archivio Mario Nigro, swiftly and generously endorsed the exhibition by donating two paintings in tempera on paper by Mario Nigro that will benefit the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Both of them will be exhibited: Untitled, 1949 (from the Black Panel Series) and Untitled, 1950 (from the Checkered Panels Series), These works indicate the main thrust of the show, which examines the problematics of Nigro’s artistic, conceptual and stylistic research. The art of Mario Nigro (Pistoia, 1917 – Livorno, 1992), one of the most dedicated protagonists of Italian artistic experiment in the second half of the twentieth century, is presented by curator Luca Massimo Barbero through a small cross-section of his work, with specific attention to the period of the late 1940s to the mid 1960s.
Homage to Mario Nigro is organized with the Archivio Mario Nigro, Milan, which is currently preparing a catalogue raisonné, edited by Germano Celant.
Mario Nigro belongs among those Italian painters whose pictorial language sustained a constant dialogue with international trends. His artistic identity, which continuously evolved, could be described as a highly personal conjugation of dynamic abstraction, with references to science, mathematics, music and tonality, according to a rational methodology focusing on structure and feeling. The exhibit constitutes a specific reading of Mario Nigro’s distinctive and various production through a selection of seminal pieces that document his pre-eminence and the innovatory character of his research within the panorama of Italian and international abstraction—to which his many appearances at the Venice Biennale and other important shows testify.
The structure of the exhibition, both essential and richly suggestive, reveals the complexity and novelty of Nigro’s art. His language manifests the expressive tension, rooted in an underlying dimension of existential despair existentialism, which is released not in the immediacy of an informel aesthetic nor of gestural painting but rather through reduction and essence, anticipating the Minimalist currents of the 1960s.
The first of the two galleries present a pair of paintings of 1950 from the Checkerboard Series. In these Nigro animates a pattern of black and white orthogonals, whose genesis is to be found in the neo-plastic grids of Piet Mondrian, in a dynamic movement deriving from Italian Futurism, by multiple and overlapping planes and by shifting color tones. Within this implied pictorial space one can begin to read the creative process that led Nigro to his original evolution of the abstract constructivist language. The perceptual complexity of these images, with which Nigro was well ahead of his time, is expressed in a sequence of important works on paper from this period, including the two donations to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. They function dialectically with Checkers (1952), the painting which opens the exhibition and which signals the moment of transition from the dynamics of the orthogonal to those of the diagonal—a decisive shift that led to the paintings which are installed in the subsequent gallery.
The second gallery illustrates the increased complexity and richness of Nigro’s work between the 1950s and 1960s. The works exhibited here relate to his cycle of works exploring the concept of ‘total space’--from sketches on paper to works on canvas and even three-dimensional pieces with environmental implications. Nigro’s ‘total space’ visualizes the interpenetration of several degrees of reality and dimensionality while simultaneously referencing relativistic science and the living drama of ‘becoming’. He does this with irreducible fugitive perspectives of optical-perceptual latticework which he sets in motion by both structural and chromatic means. The sketches on paper shown here reveal how Nigro proceeded serially by a complex iteration of structure and form which found manifold expression in the works on canvas: from the most orderly optical intersections in dimensional planes present in the work Total Space: Structures (1953-56), to the dramatic break in Total Space: Interruption (1954); from the rhythmic progressions of Total Space: Simultaneous Rhythmic Progressions in Vibratory Variation (1955), to the linear progressions of Total Space: Simultaneous Dramatic Divergences (1954-59), and Total Space: Opposing Contrasts (1954-59-61).
Two additional works complete the room and expand upon Nigro’s reflections on ‘total space’ in three-dimensions. From the Total Space of 1954: Series of 12 Continuous Rhombi in Simultaneous Alternate Opposing Rhythmic Progression (1965) is composed of 12 elements for a total length of 7 meters and was exhibited in a room dedicated to Nigro at the 1968 Venice Biennale. This is a sequential work experienced by walking through the combination of wall and floor sculptures. Secondly, From Total Space: Simultaneous Opposing Rhythmic Progression (1966) is a transposition of the virtual optical grids from the works on canvas into two opposing perspective lattices in wood painted red.
A bilingual catalogue in Italian and English will be published, which will trace the life and works of Mario Nigro, from the end of the 1940s to the 1960s.