After the success of the exhibition SPAZIO TOTALE, hosted at the Lugano venue, Cortesi Gallery is pleased to present a new chapter in this journey through the main artistic movements of the second half of the 20th century. The latest exhibition, set up for this occasion in Milan, celebrates art as a form of awareness and a deep investigation of concepts, pushing beyond the rigidity of white that characterized the Lugano exhibition.
This second stage aims to complement the artists previously showcased with a new selection of works from private collections that revolve around Azimuth’s artistic experiences.
Azimuth, founded in 1959 as an avant-garde magazine by Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani and later developed into the homonymous art gallery – Azimut – provided the Milanese creative scene with a meeting point for reflecting on the possibility of experimental art, understood both in its technical-material dimension and its aesthetic-conceptual one. Around these two prominent figures, represented in the exhibition by two masterpieces, gathered a large group of artists who shared the same spirit of artistic revolution. Among the Italians, it is worth mentioning Vincenzo Agnetti, present in the show with two conceptual works from the 1970s, and between the international characters, we recall Heinz Mack, founder of the ZERO group, whose artistic path has closely aligned with the avant-garde ideas of the Milanese circle from the very beginning.
The exhibition brings to the fore a generation of artists seeking to free painting from narration and figuration, often exploring unconventional materials borrowed from the industrial world. In this context, Heinz Mack favours aluminium, Günther Uecker works with nails, and Gianni Colombo with polystyrene. At the same time, this expressive drive is accompanied by the need to reconnect art to reality through authentic and diverse expressive choices.
While the first chapter of SPAZIO TOTALE focused on the use of the monochrome, this new instalment delves into other common elements that, though shared, manifest in unique and distinctive forms for each of the involved personalities. From here comes the adoption of orthogonal structures as an anti-compositional factor, the dynamic of vibration and movement as the spatial expansion of energy, and an indispensable luminosity, understood as a creative force in constant evolution.
SPAZIO TOTALE: Part II goes beyond mere cataloguing of artists who found their highest expression in the purity of white, juxtaposing Mack’s works with those of Manzoni, Pomodoro’s sculptures with those of Consagra, highlighting a shared thought by an entire generation of artists: not to limit forms of expression to pure and immediate representation, but to focus on the phenomena that make this representation possible, often understood as absence and a pure analysis of concepts.
