Cortesi Gallery is delighted to announce two solo exhibitions by Maurizio Donzelli that will open at Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Lissone on June 13, and in the Lugano gallery location on June 16. Two site-specific projects, coming up with specially-created new works to dialogue with the exhibition spaces.
These exhibitions are not only the first show organised both from the Museum and the gallery after the temporary closure due to the lockdown, but also among the first events inItaly to mark the new expected moment.
THRESHOLDS, the title of the project and therefore the one given to the two exhibitions, allusion is to the role played by art able to create bridges between different historical phases and different worlds. A title that, conceived months before the lockdown, sounds now prophetic.
In Lugano, the layout of works unleashes great iconic power, from his recent monochrome works on gold, visual sources of form that emerge and dive back into striking splendour reminiscent of the mosaics of Ravenna, upheavals of the early twentieth century, conceptual abstractions from the 1960s and 1970s, and his Drawings and Disegni del Quasi that work on the vibration and transmutation of the image, from small to large format, experimenting with his recent use of resin that welcomes and protects chromatic mutations; from his newly-made Arazzi, textures that house palindromic forms of ancient origin, to his Mirrors that, depending on the position of the viewer’s gaze, hide or reveal organic drawings and rarefied textures.
The title of the two exhibitions (in Lugano curated by Ilaria Bignotti, in Lissone curated by Alberto Zanchetta, Director of the Museum and Ilaria Bignotti), combines the idea both of a threshold and a crossing over, highlighting one of the paradigmatic aspects of MaurizioDonzelli’s artistic research: his work on the image between evidence and latency, transformation and appearance.
Both exhibitions are part of a broader artistic project dedicated to the works of Maurizio Donzelli: over the next two years, the artist will feature in more solo exhibitions, hold study days, and take part in meetings at public institutions and in private spaces.
Not only does this project offer an extraordinary opportunity to follow the dialogue Donzelli’s work prompts, step by step, in these exhibition spaces, it is also a part introduction to the complex visual laboratory of an artist who has never wished to identify his investigation in terms of established currents, but rather as part of his own ongoing personal research that interweaves philosophical and iconographic studies with historical investigations and anthropological sensibilities to explore the potential of the image for analogy, transformation and transfiguration.