rome blog

Throughout the centuries there’s been frequent massacres of artists, philosophers, thinkers, writers, scientists and activists who have been sentenced to death for defending their ideals with strength and coherence, for having carried out their personal struggles against a society that censored them with violence.

From that fact, the exhibition ‘Undressed of flesh’ tries to represent some of these famous people with pictorial language, conferring an artistic dimension to the tragic events of history (also recent history). And so, Antonello Morsillo, an Italian artist who lives and works in Rome, decided to concentrate his recent production on the history of these famous disappeared people, making a last exhibition as a tribute to upstream thinking and condemning denied freedom.

Morsillo was born in southern Italy, in Foggia, and since he was a teen he took interest in illustration, beginning to make characters for cartoons. Years later, in Rome, he was to obtain his degree in graphic advertising, drawing and painting. His first individual exhibition was the publication of a catalogue in 2002. For four years Morsillo worked with SonyBMG and this experience allowed him to establish himself definitively as an illustrator thanks to the making of album covers for popular Italian singers, such as Milva, Patty Pravo and Luigi Tenco.

But it’s with the exhibition ‘Undressed of flesh’ that Morsillo reaches a new era in his artistic development, uniting illustration and painting and a deep theoretical investigation. This way, he makes a pictorial and conceptual route that takes us to the murders of Federico García Lorca, Giordano Bruno, Sophie Scholl, Matthew Shepard, Gandhi and many more.

And so, Morsillo chose Ipazia, a mathematician, astronomer and philosopher from ancient Greece who was literally cut to pieces by a group of Christians, and he represents her pregnant, as the mother of science. We also find Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Italian writer and film director who was murdered in 1975 by a ‘ragazzo di vita’ (child of life) and he’s represented with open arms, simulating a flight from his ‘crucifixion’. There’s also Giordano Bruno, who doesn’t have a mouth in the painting but slight marks instead that seem to slowly give him back his words, and Sophie Scholl (leader and activist of the anti-Nazi movement ‘White Rose’), represented with a white rose in her mouth, tied by a string of thorns that condemns silence.

The exhibition can be visited until the 17th of February at the Rodari Library, located on Via Francesco Tovaglieri 237/a (00169). The opening times are from Monday to Friday from 9am till 7pm, Saturday from 9am till 1.30pm and closed all day Sunday. You’ll find more information on this webpage: www.artribune.com/dettaglio/?type=event&id=7619

menschauser

If you find yourself in the beautiful Italian capital, don’t miss this interesting exhibition. We also recommend that you rent apartments in Rome and come and enjoy a stay in this city to discover all the cultural and artistic initiatives that it offers.

Contact Me 

Translated by: aleixgwilliam
Contact Me

The city of Rome, and in particular the beautiful Complesso del Vittoriano, will host during the entire month of January the exhibition “Perfect Harmony”, by the great Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944). This important retrospective, which will be open until the 29th of January, presents a comprehensive tour of the artist’s work, through about 70 paintings and drawings, along with some forty works of other artists who influenced more significantly his work. Thus, by walking through the artistic development of Piet Mondrian, in the exhibition “Perfect Harmony” is possible to get to know the evolution of formal and conceptual investigation of one of the most important artists of the twentieth century.

Mondrian was undoubtedly best known for the rectangular structures of his last works, he actually began his artistic production because of his fascination by the Dutch landscape around him. It was only later that he began to investigate the alleged “essential knowledge”, trying to reduce the representation to its more intimate and necessary lines, eliminating all plastic items considered superfluous. His purpose was ambitious: by using geometry, he intended to find the basic structure that moves the entire universe. To achieve this goal, he deleted the curves, the nuances and the figurative representation (which he considered misleading) and even got to prohibit the presence of green in his home. For the extreme simplicity of his last works, those who came to understand the deeper meaning that was hidden in the structure -indeed very simple – in his paintings have often trivialized the artist.

The exhibition “Perfect Harmony” features masterpieces exceptionally granted to Complesso del Vittoriano, by the Gemeentemuseum (whose director is also the curator of the exhibition) and has been made possible through the collaboration and support of major institutions such as the Denver Art Museum, the Philadelphia Art Museum, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo.

Benno Tempel, curator of “Perfect Harmony” and Gemeentenmuseum director, stressed that Mondrian is one of the few artists who have left the regular production of art. In fact, as he says, few artists have managed to renew their production steadily, while maintaining a relevant tension to the search for new formal expressions and reworking of the concepts behind the works. One of the most interesting aspects of the Mondrian’s formal investigation, is precisely the will to achieve a harmonious pictorial expression (from which he created abstract art), it does not simply represent reality, but a Utopia capable of making you think of transcending ways. For more information: http://www.comune.roma.it

menschauser

So if you are in the Italian capital, do not miss the opportunity to learn more about the work of this great artist and his reunited comprehensive retrospective. Otherwise, you can rent apartments in Rome and come to spend a few days with art and culture that will surround you.

Contact Me 

Translated by: Hans
Contact Me

Arriving in a city is sometimes not enough to satisfy our curiosity on our trip. Generally, the big cities have as many great contrasting experiences as places it offers. In big cities, generally, a larger amount of events and cultural spaces congregate, as well as a much more diverse community, both from the country itself as from other countries. The wealth of a city like Rome is precisely in those details.

In Rome, you can find a giant range of cultural offering that you cannot fulfill in a couple of days. The recommended time to visit Rome is probably from seven to ten days, considering that they would be extensive days of long walks as well as visits to different important historical places. The museums, of course, are a necessity if you’re in Rome. Get ready to try some of the best Italian cuisine in the whole country, delicious coffees and select wines.

Nightlife is also very lively in Rome; clubs, bars, concerts… from jazz to rock, garage, reggae… the options are unlimited. This as well, that despite being the centre of such a conservative religion as catholicism, Rome is opening its collective mind more and more towards the gay and lesbian community, offering different parties, discos and places for the LGBT community. Rome is growing all the time and, this way, it still offers alternatives to a different visitor from anywhere around the world.

If you’re in Rome and you want to disconnect from the stir of the city for a day, there’s nothing better than visiting the beautiful town of Tivoli, located barely 20 miles from the Italian capital. As well as beautiful visits of great natural value, in Tivoli you can see and walk around Villa Adriana and Villa d’Este, both named World Heritage sites by UNESCO due to their impressive beauty and history.

In the same way, in Tivoli you can find the famous Rocca Pia, a 15th century fortress ordered to be built by the Pope Pius II. Also, there’s the temple of Vesta, goddess of fire and the home. More impressively, still in Tivoli, is the sanctuary of Hercules, which dates from the 2nd century BC. When you’re there you’ll find it in ruins, but in its time it was one of the biggest constructions in the whole of Italy. The Cathedral of San Lorenzo is also very close, and it offers a space of gathering for those religious people or interested ones in impressive domes of sacred art.

The trip from Rome to Tivoli can be made by car, train or bus. You can use the transport which is most convenient for you and adjusted to your budget, or even combine them. The price is relative according to the route that you choose, but it’s worth doing this one. Preferably, start early in the morning, so that you can do a calm and better organized route without so many tourists around you.

Alexa Ray

Get apartments in Rome and visit Tivoli, you’ll definitely be fascinated.

Contact Me 

Translated by: aleixgwilliam
Contact Me

On the 11^th of October the exhibition Soviet Realism. Great Soviet Painting 1920 – 1970 will be opened at the Palazzo delle Esposizione Rome. This sample represents the largest revision that has been done on the Soviet painting and Realism movement outside Russia.

The exhibition takes as its starting point the Revolution of October and covers up to the age of Leonid Brezhnev (1964-1982). It is organized chronologically in seven rooms of the Palazzo and aims to refute the myth of Soviet Realism, showing how artists challenged the tight control exercised by the State on the artwork itself.

Soviet Realism is the definition given in the statutes of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1932, which applies to all branches of art and creation. This defined a way to understand and express the art linked to the socialist ideology that prevailed in the Soviet Union and became publicity for the regime rather than an art aimed to delight the majority.

However, the realism comes in the middle of the nineteenth century with the depletion of Romanticism, the emergence of social changes and the positivism. The idea was to represent the reality as accurately as possible, pushing and looking for the ideal of beauty itself. Many artists obeyed these rules, as is the case Nesterov who changes his admirers from the aristocracy for the people and the party itself.

When Stalin got the power, many artists were forced to focus their works on the idealization of the worker and the allegories of the new society, where the mother and children were the embodiment of purity that is attributed to socialism. After the Second World War, the epic extolling the fervor of the socialist homeland was the central theme of their works. However, despite all the criticism made to state intervention in the freedom to create the art of this period, there was the highest technical level of arts that the Great Russian school of painting produced.

After Stalin’s death, the limits to the art creation were abolished, by questioning the cult of personality and the reinstatement of the banned artists to the art scene. However, realism remained the dominant trend in the Soviet art and the few artists who continue to reject this imposition are still in the ostracism, no space to display or resources to create.

The opening of the 80s allowed the emerge of a new generation of painters and artists that aerate the suffocating world of art. This situation definitely brought down the Soviet Realism in art.

For more information:

http://www.palazzoesposizioni.it/MediaCenter/FE/CategoriaMedia.aspx?idc=550&explicit=SI

Nancy Guzman

More than 20 years has passed after the fall of the Soviet Union and socialism, this exhibition is a good memory exercise. So if you are enjoying a few days in apartments in Rome pay a visit to some museums and do not forget including this show.

Contact Me 

Translated by: Hans
Contact Me

Until the 29th of January of 2012, the MAXXI Contemporary Art Museum in Rome holds the exhibition ‘Indian Highway’, a collective and itinerant review which shows is the Indian contemporary art scene. The exhibition is commissioned by Julia Ferracci, art director of the MAXXI, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Gunnar B. Kvaran and Julia Peyton-Jones.

The MAXXI Museum carries out the first exhibition in Italy on the current art scene in India, understanding that, today, it’s an area which is going through important economic and social transformations which are reflected in aesthetic representation. To carry out this interesting exhibition, the museum had the collaboration of Oslo’s Astrup Fearnley Modern Art Museum and the Serpentine Gallery in London.

Today, Indian art is breaking onto the global scene and it’s considered as one of the most interesting one amongst the emerging countries, at least so say the critics, who see in as a new trend which receives its boost from the great changes that the country is going through. However, from those big transformations that are observed from the crisis of the Western model, few talk about the millions of human beings who live in poverty and misery. That’s why the outlook of the contemporary artists from that part of the world give to this invisible economic success in India.

The walk through this exhibition establishes an interesting sequence which brings us to cultural polysemy among the different artists chosen for this exhibition, where meanings and references generate a space for thinking for the spectator.

The dialectics between modernity and tradition, characteristic from times of transformations and modernization, is something which art picks up with wonderful sensitiveness, especially which this is reflected in different trends and styles. With the new generation of artists not being shaped by the post-colonial inheritance, they manifest their acceptance to Western art in a much more relaxed way, seizing the post-medial condition which contemporary art has validated.

One of the artists who will be present in this exhibition and who represents this new generation of the artistic scene in India is Jitish Kallat, born in Mumbai in 1974. His work has travelled the world and has as a concept the cry of disappointment of one of the cultural transformations who have broken the charm of society and the values inherited by great social fighters like Gandhi. His work is produced in large formats and he uses different supports, such as paintings, sculptures and exhibitions.

Like many say, art is product of its time, and this exhibition definitely shows it. From there that it’s interesting to see different minimal conceptual art expressions which tell us about a new India, where the post-colonial component seems to have disappeared from the horizon.

For more information: http://www.fondazionemaxxi.it/

Nancy Guzman

Indian Highway is a great input into Indian contemporary culture, which invites us to walk through a society of contradictions. So, if you’d thought of renting apartments in Rome for a few days, come a soak yourself in culture at the MAXXI Museum.

Contact Me 

Translated by: aleixgwilliam
Contact Me

On the 6^th of September at the Gallery Vittoria  (located on Margutta street No 103. Rome) will open at 18:30 the exhibition “Enigma of the soul”, by the Italian artist Emilio Tabasco.

The renowned Italian painter and poet born in Pollica (province of Salerno), currently lives and works in Montreuil (Paris). He exhibits his works in galleries and art venues worldwide, primarily in New York, Paris, Los Angeles and Hamburg.

His paintings are mainly focused on the possibility of a relation between words and visuals, and the possibilities offered by the union of different languages in artistic expression. This topic has inspired visual art in many cases, especially the avant-garde, and the work of Emilio Tabasco is presented as a research tool to achieve a “total” dimension of the artwork that carries the viewer to experience a hard to believe dimension while thinking about it.

The artist has had several periods where he has developed his painting, including a period of “apocalyptic”, a “geometric”, a “surreal” and a set of “petrified” by the texture of his works and the topics chosen. In his poems, which have more to do with literary surrealism, he talks about the human condition through the images of shadows, chasms, voices, and reflection on the truths of our perennial unattainable and uncertainties.

The solo exhibition “Enigma of the soul”, curated by Tiziana Todi, is visible from the 6^th to the 18^th of September, Mon-Fri from 15hs to 19hs, although we recommend visiting the artist’s website for any changes in hours: www.emilio-tabasco.it. In this exhibition the artist struggles to provide direct emotion and a provocation, which was defined by the curators of the exhibition as “a blunt truth that seeps through the cracks of society and is printed in his canvases.” The techniques used by the artist are evolving an investigation of his feelings, emotions and experiences. For these reasons, the title reflects the difficulty of expressing the soul through the language of art.

Since the mid-’70s, Enrico Todi and his daughter Tiziana (curator of this show) are devoted to promoting young artists and students of the Academy of Fine Arts, and the dissemination of more established artists in the scene nationally and internationally. One of the distinguishing features of this gallery is – as the owners love to emphasize – the search for a human relationship between the gallery and the artist, which may evolve into an informal, but fruitful collaboration for both.

menschauser

So if you are interested in this exciting project, visit Gallery Vittoria in Rome and admire the exhibition “Enigma of the soul”, we recommend you to rent apartments in Rome and come to enjoy a stay devoted to art in the beautiful capital of Italy.

Contact Me 

Translated by: Hans
Contact Me

Museum MAXXI, the most important museum for contemporary art in Rome, exhibits a retrospective of one of the well-known Italian artists: Michelangelo Pistoletto.

The exhibition features over 100 works from Italian and American, public and private collections. This extraordinary exhibition shows Pistoletto´s professional development since 1956 until 1974, in a retrospective that promises to define the personality and sensibility of one of the founding artists of the famous Italian movement called “Arte Povera”.

This movement, which became known in the late ’60s, was an accurate critique of the commercialization of art, and tried to escape from the “market” by using materials considered as “poor” (wood, leaves, crystals, plants, coal and clay), as well as requiring the intervention of the public to be alive. The idea, still very strong in Pistoletto´s work, led to significant reflection on art and its meaning through the observation of materials handled and readily available.

Michelangelo Pistoletto was born in Biella in 1933. He made his first artistic works at the age of 14, when he worked with his father restoring art, and then as an apprentice of Armando Testa, famous founder of the most important school of graphics at that time. In 1950, Pistoletto began exhibiting in collective exhibitions. He had his first solo exhibition at the Galleria Galatea in Turin in 1960. In 2003 he won the “Leone d’Oro” at the Venice Biennale for his artistic career and Turin University conferred an honorary degree in Political Science. He is currently the artistic director of “Event”, a festival of urban development that takes place in Bordeaux.

The exhibition “From one to many”, that will remain at museum MAXXI until the 15^th of August, explores Pistoletto´s artistic career from his rigorous self-investigation and representation of his identity, to the most recent artistic collaborations with other great artists. The works are divided into three main groups: Reflective surfaces and plexiglass, the “Oggetti in meno” (less important objects) and “Stracci” (Rags), as well as the series “Light and reflections.” A separate space is reserved for the actions and performances of the theater group “The Zoo”, which hosts video objects and records of their works.

The exhibition aims to fully reconstruct the work of an Italian artist in the difficult context of the transformations that changed the country during the postwar period, exploring his relationship with art movements such as Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptualism and, in a particular way, emphasizing the collaborative aspect of Pistoletto´s work from the second half of the ’50s. For more information please visit the web www.fondazionemaxxi.it

menschauser

If you are passionate about art and do not want to miss this interesting exhibition at the MAXXI, do not miss the chance to rent apartments in Rome while enjoying a cultural stay in the Italian capital.

Contact Me 

Translated by: Hans
Contact Me

In a city of great men, emperors, architects, warriors and gladiators there is also a place for a woman as audacious as Tamara De Lempicka. Queen of the art of seduction and deception, this prophetic artist, of mysterious origins, is the painter of wonderful portraits and feminine nudes which blend artistic movements as varied as Cubism and Art Decó.

This artist enjoyed her peak in the 1930s when she made her living painting portraits of decadent nobles and up-and-coming members of the bourgeois. However, after the Second World War her genius was forgotten, and despite her work’s association with Surrealism and Abstract Art it fell into neglect. It wasn’t until 1972, by which time Tamara was an elderly lady, that an exhibition in Paris dedicated to the Roaring Twenties  – its cabaret, eroticism and sensuality – rescued her from the indifference of critics and the public.

Tamara was of Russian-Polish origins, and as such was influenced by the works of various Russian artists, including many revolutionary ones like Tatlin. Nonetheless, she rejected their revolutionary ideals, preferring instead to associate herself with the wealthy bourgeois, and spending much of her time in private parties where sex and drugs were openly indulged in. Tamara’s image as a liberal and transgressive woman caused her to be rejected by many; as did her links to the old Tsarist regime and her life of luxury and pleasure while many Russians were dying of hunger.

Despite the geometric shapes present in many of her works, and her bold use of colour, De Lempicka’s work was not able to appeal to modern artistic tastes which were more geared towards French surrealists and German abstract paintings. Her paintings became closer to works of decorative art, depicting nostalgia for aristocratic society and a life of luxury that no longer existed. Nonetheless, whether it can be considered high art or ‘merely’ decoration, there’s no doubt that De Lempicka’s work is dazzling, bright with colour and irresistibly appealing to the eye of the spectator. This is perhaps no surprise, given the capricious and pleasure-seeking nature of the artist herself.

Now, 31 years after the artist’s death, the Complesso del Vittoriano in Rome, presents an exhibition called Tamara De Lempicka. La regina del modern (The Queen of the Modern). It will be open until August 10. More information: http://www.delempicka.org/exhibitions/2011-rome.html Complesso del Vittoriano, via XXIV Maggio y San Pietro in Carcere. Info 066780664.

Eli M

Without a doubt, this is a great exhibition and a perfect excuse to visit one of the most historic capitals in the world. Come and rent apartments in Rome and enjoy a relaxing stay as well as this very special show.

Contact Me 

Translated by: Ben Palmer
Contact Me

The Capitoline Museum in Rome is currently presenting the exhibition The many faces of power until the 25^th of September. The interesting perspective that this exhibition offers is the reflection of power, based on the Roman portrait as an instrument of communication for perpetuating a culture of winners and consolidating the political and social prestige in the society.

The exhibition curated by Eugenio La Rocca and Claudio Parisi Precisse, comprises more than 150 pieces from the end of the era of the Republican age. The pieces are formed by heads, busts and statues belonging to the collections of several European museums.

The Roman portrait originated in the art that was created from the funeral rituals of the Etruscan culture, in the Hellenistic Greek culture and in the maiorum images, which were wax masks made in memory of the dead. These masks were meant to be use in the funeral processions. The sculpture of the portrait consists of a short bust that represents the neck and the face of the character. This symbolism played an important role in the society during the Republic age.

The exhibition indicates that these portraits were supposed to transcend and transmit the individual memory of those who made them. This would be the same case of painting and later, photography and video, which are technical advances that democratize gradually the eagerness to transcend when capturing the image and perpetuating it at a very low cost.

All the emperors used their own codes to highlight their politics and differentiate themselves from previous figures in power. As is done today in politics, stereotypes that define its attributes and its mirrored feature in the images were sought.

Thus, there are tranquil faces that express the attribute of austerity and welfare, like Augustus’s portraits, which were meant to reflect a prosperous, honest and idealist government. The features that made him look like a perfect, intelligent and powerful man were highlighted. His portraits were done as life-size statues, in order to show him wearing outfits that reflected power, also adorned with allegorical objects, like the law scroll in his hand.

There were important sculptors that played the same role that is played today by publicists in Politics; they gave superhuman attributes to wealthy people. Publicists allowed dictatorial leaders to increase their authoritarian power. That is the case of Emperor Claudius, who posed naked and wearing thick laurel headband, as a divinity.

This indicates how important portraits were during the Republican age, because by means of portraits, politicians and leaders empowered themselves and showed their power to the citizens.

For more information: http://www.museicapitolini.org/mostre_ed_eventi/mostre/ritratti_le_tante_facce_del_potere

Nancy Guzman

Visiting this exhibition is a great idea for your vacations in Rome. You can visit it while you stay at one of the apartments in Rome This exhibition will allow you to understand that political advertising already existed before our time.

Contact Me 

Translated by: Hans
Contact Me

The Gallery of Modern Art in Rome presents the exhibition The Myth of Italy in Victorian England, through the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne. The exhibition is organized around more than 100 works from private collections and international museums and will be open until June 12. It invites us to discover the nineteenth century English art and the influence of Italian aesthetic prototypes of the time in their iconography.ç

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was an association of artists, poets, philosophers and English critics founded in London in 1848. This group was revealed to the academic art dictatorship prevailing in England during the nineteenth century. Their critics pointed to the founder of the Royal Academy of Arts, Joshua Reynolds, for perpetuating the mannerism in Italian painting after Raphael de Urbino and Michelangelo. The criticism focused on the influence of rising urban aesthetics and its effect on art. From this discussion, they built the theoretical basis on the meaning of art and artists’ work driving a change in the forms of artistic work, which required capturing the outdoor scenery by taking up the bright colors of Flemish and Italian of the Renaissance. Its founders were Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais.

This group proposed the reformulation of art based on objectives that required authenticity analysis to develop sincere unconventional art, far from the influences, which ended the complacency learned in academia to find artistic perfection. From the standpoint of painting meant a return to romanticism, where the artist captures the pure reality, without distortion.

The art theorist John Ruskin was a major driver of the Pre-Raphaelites, his theoretical works that express its rejection of social and cultural changes of the Industrial Revolution, being considered harmful to the ideals of beauty, had a huge influence on Victorian intellectuals.

Edward Burne Jones, a student of Dante Rossetti workshop, strongly influenced by Italian art traveled to Venice and Milan to seek inspiration from the Renaissance. However, he developed his own style and transcended British painting as one of the most interesting painters of the Romanticism. His work inspired the poet Charles Swinburne, who dedicated him Poems & Balads.

The painter, poet and teacher Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born in London in 1828. His work was dominated by his admiration for Italian Renaissance art that inspired him to explore the human beauty with incredible richness of color and an intense eroticism hidden behind the veil of mysticism that he developed in his series of the myth of Persephone and Monna Vanna. Like Renaissance artists, he combined painting with poetry and translation of Dante and other Italian writers’ texts. He created school through his thinking about art and marked a whole generation of British painters who watched with devotion the Italian Renaissance. His book Poems, rescued from the grave of his wife, caused burning in Victorian society because of the eroticism and sensuality to describe the passion of the sexual act, calling it in a burlesque way the “Fleshly school of poetry”.

For further info: http://www.gnam.beniculturali.it/index.php?en/22/events/81/dante-gabriel-rossetti-edward-burne-jones-e-il-mito-dellitalia-nellinghilterra-vittoriana

Nancy Guzman

Knowing the work of these rebels and the influence of Italian art had in Victorian England is a good bet for visitors to Rome, but best of all is in apartments in Rome where you can tour the gardens of fleshly poetry.?

Contact Me 

Translated by: Maria
Contact Me