MAURIZIO NANNUCCI at MAXXI
From June 26 to October 18, 2015 MAXXI dedicates to Maurizio Nannucci, one of the most important names in Italian contemporary art from the 1960s to the present time, a major exhibition entitled Where to Start From, curated by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi.
The exhibition explores, with works both early and recent, the importance and the central position of Nannucci’s artistic research. Two new installations were made for this occasion, including the sound installation Sound Samples and More Than Meets the Eye, a large-scale work for MAXXI’s facade which, thanks to Amici del MAXXI, will join the museum collection.
Since the 1960s, Maurizio Nannucci, a point of reference for many generations of artists, architects, musicians, critics and curators, has examined the relationship between art, language, and image. His research, which has always been characterized by the dialogue between the various disciplines, explores the relationship between light, color, sound and both real and imagined space, which becomes particularly evident in his large neon writings. Nannucci’s work is conceptual – it is an exploration between culture and society, with a close connection between architecture and urban landscape – whose language restores a symbolic and spatial value to the single words.
As concerns his research the artist says "I believe that the image transcends the limits of the representation, becoming a mental image, a virtual one, an image born from a dream or a dream with eyes wide open, a visualized and relative image, which can be evoked by a single word, a sound, or a scent. The same can be said for the images that refer to each other and require the absence of an object; I do not limit them, nor do I reduce them to a figure; I give them freedom and fantastic independence...”
Maurizio Nannucci (Florence, 1939) is one of the protagonists of Italian art in the recent decades, as well as having achieved international acclaim. Since the mid-1960s he has explored the complex relations between art, language and image, creating unprecedented conceptual proposals, characterized by the use of a variety of media: neon, photography, video, sound, artists’ editions and books. His first neon texts date from 1967: these bring to his work a more varied dimension of meanings and a new perception of space.
Photo credit: Maurizio Nannucci, There is another way of looking at things, 2012, installation view Musee d’Art Moderne de Saint Etienne Metropole. Courtesy the artist
