Flower power

23/5/2009

CRAA - CURRENT ART RESEARCH CENTER - VILLA GIULIA, VERBANIA

The exhibition, divided into 7 sections, examines the multiple representations of the 'flower object' through a thematic, stylistic and symbolic excursus that includes over five centuries of Italian and international art and over 160 works by artists from the Baroque era to the present day. The different chapters tend to group by themes and representations the symbolic use of the flower which, through our culture, has been a messenger and expression of grace, charm and seduction.

PRESS RELEASE

Exhibition and catalog curated by Andrea Busto

The exhibition, divided into 7 sections, examines the multiple representations of the "flower object" through a thematic, stylistic and symbolic excursus that includes over five centuries of Italian and international art and over 160 works by artists from the Baroque era to the present day. The different chapters of the exhibition and the catalog tend to group by themes and representations the symbolic use of the flower which, through our culture, has been a messenger and expression of grace, charm and seduction.

1. Flower Power

The first section of the exhibition is dedicated to the theme of the flower as a symbol of peace and social transformation.
The starting point is Bernie Boston's photograph, taken in Washington in 1967 entitled "Flower power", which gives us the image of young American boys who introduce flowers into military guns in protest of the war in Vietnam. deployed in defense of the Pentagon. The use of non-violence as a recurring theme in the political slogans of the seventies and their “floral” representation determines a political and aesthetic revolution in all fields. Fashion and design in those years changed radically, the purified shapes of the Sixties were contaminated by phytomorphic forms, deduced from the floral parts such as pistils and petals and the colors become bright, dazzling, ringing causing in people a perception of freedom and joy. Sexual freedom also passes through this movement which expresses the use of drugs and rock music as a whole between lifestyle, political philosophy and revolution of customs.
The encounter with Eastern religions, the practice of a lifestyle lived in self-managed and self-referencing communities, the idea of ​​an extended family as a group in which the idea of ​​ownership is reworked in confused terms between Franciscan Christianity and Buddhist poverty, bringing the philosophy of the Flower Power movement towards an idea of ​​nature in which, as in a great cosmic mother, one cancels and shares in the great mystery of the cosmos.
The flower, and in particular the lotus flower, rises to this symbolism in which, in addition to representing the various vegetative stages, it takes strength and vitality from the water (great mother of all worlds) and from the beauty, care and soothing of fears and anxieties that are clouded in oblivion of clear Indo-European matrix, (the archetype is in the figures of the Homeric Lotophages). In this section the invited artists represent with their works the point of contact between becoming aware of their freedom, their political position and the philosophical idea they have of human existence.

2. The silent life 1 and 2

The floral compositions, invented in the last quarter of the sixteenth century as a stand-alone representation - by Caravaggio in Italy and by the Flemings in the Netherlands - had an immense success with the public. Collectors of the time increasingly requested pictorial compositions with objects of everyday life, fauna and flora duly combined to form decorative compositions or symbolic representations of the cosmos, mythology or more simply of nature and everyday life.
The collectors of the time acquired precise nuclei, determined by the singularity of a single theme, and the artists consequently specialized in these themes.
Moreover, the importance that some species of flowers had - such as the tulip in Holland - increased the desire to represent flowers also in painting as a specific theme, becoming real objects of "cult".
The representations of floral compositions, whether simple or arcimboldesque, determined a real mania for the use of the flower in the most disparate decorations, from furniture, to objects, to clothes. Furthermore, the still life, well represents the mood of its author and the taste of an era for style, shape and aesthetics.
This section displays some of the countless existing works that represent the evolution of the taste for still life of flowers from the Baroque painting to contemporary sculpture.

3. Eros and tanathos. Mythologies

Eroticism, sexuality, passion, life and consequently death have found in the beauty of the flower a constant mirroring of representation. From Ovid to Proust the most illustrious writers have translated the charm, sensuality and human desire from the body to the flower. The myths of Narcissus and Hyacinth represent the deep desire of man and his sexuality which in the flower find the perpetration of their existence after death. Ovid in the metamorphosis tells the story of the beautiful Narcissus who for knowledge of himself, perhaps more than for love for himself, does not hesitate to find death and atonement in the sacrifice of his own body in favor of his own spirit. For Giacinto, on the other hand, it is Zephyr's blind jealousy that determines his transformation from being a semi-divine to a flower symbol of a dominant and totalizing passion. A hidden and suffered love often takes the name of a flower, for the Baron of Charlus in Proust's Recherche the physical love for the beautiful and vulgar Odette de Crecy was whispered through a symbolic phrase: "Far Cattleya" which, as for the Violetta Valery's camellias - Verdi's Traviata - was used to communicate one's willingness to sexual intercourse.
The name of a flower can be at the same time pain of remembrance and invocation as for Forget-me-not. And so other flowers take their name from peculiar characteristics such as that of following the evolution of our celestial star (the Sunflowers), others indicate a color (the Violets and Lilacs), others express feelings or temporal conditions (the Sensitive or the Belladinotte ). Men who become flowers, flowers that are humanized through a game of mirrors and reflections where the thin border of things is lost in the vast world of desires that become reality.

4. Herbariums

Herbariums were born in the Middle Ages with the first pharmaceutical experiences of medicinal medicine in the monasteries of the monks and in the first Galenic pharmacies, places suspended between esoreism, science and alchemy. The flower itself with its therapeutic qualities and its beauty is researched, cultivated and studied. Herbariums are the first documents of a science derived from the observation and study of nature.
The natural elements are collected, dried and arranged in tables that summarize the direct examination of things, the birth of the scientific laboratory and its documents. Artists have often borrowed this vocabulary to transpose it into painting or photography, creating non-interpretative works, but objective tables of natural reality. Flowers in their pure simplicity express essentiality, minimalism and purity for the artists exhibited in this section, poised between science and pure form in space.
The "complex simplicity" of floral nature - and its fragility - expresses archetypal oxymorons in which concepts such as strength and fragility, beauty and scientism coexist simultaneously and harmoniously.

5. Genetic mutations

The personalization of nature has always fascinated man and since the Renaissance the "fusion" between human and natural has been expressed in hybrid and fantastic forms.
The imagination of man made up for the scarce scientific knowledge through inventions and irrationalisms as in the case of the ginseng root which, due to its anthropomorphic conformation, gave rise to magical beliefs and provoked a series of conjectures about the celestial origin of this plant. The Seychelles coconut, in its differentiation between male and female plant, caused amazement to the point of making it, for the surrealists, an object of worship and collection.
Now, with the discovery of transgenetic mutations, the floral world prefigured by the artists of the avant-garde of the '900 or in works such as The Little Shop of Horrors or even as in the fairy tale The Beanstalk, the way of flowers becomes abnormal and horrid, the beautiful and the pleasant give way to the monstrous and deformed in which flowers and plants prevail over man and make him smaller like a Lilliputian in the presence of Gulliver, transforming themselves into unnatural elements composed of plastics and polymers.

6. Towards abstraction

The starting point is Monet's garden in Giverny and the slow but equally inexorable decline of nature in its optical decomposition into pictorial particles. The water lilies and their reflection on the water of motionless ponds or the rippling of the liquid surface of marshes that refract the sunlight bring the painting, and everything that is conceptually behind it, to form chromatic backgrounds and increasingly indistinct pictorial spaces , bordering on the incomprehensible and indefinite. The shape of the flowers is only a starting point for unclassifiable spots and colors in which sentiment and sensation - defined as "impression" - determine the work in all its expressiveness. From Monet to Twombly and from Pierson's photography to Schiess, the world of flowers participates in deconstructing space and time,

7. Geometries, decorations, pop

From the scientific compositions of the herbariums, classifications arise strongly, which by schematism and rigor, lead to the geometric and formal reconstruction of the flower.
A rationalist world, as opposed to the natural irrational one, has been taking shape since the times of ancient classical Greece. The shape of the column and its stem derived from the shape of the tree leads to the creation of phytomorphic decorations which, for simplification, are minimized and geometrized. A palm leaf, an acanthus leaf, a papyrus leaf for the Egyptians, determine the stylistic elaboration of the decoration of the capitals and other leaves and other elements lead to the production of ornaments for architecture.
The world of flowers, stylized through art, gradually leads to the reworking of styles and patterns, fabrics, architecture, urban design and re-appropriating decorative elements of the past and declining the flower element in balanced shapes between reality and geometry.

Artists

Abetz & Drescher, Heather & Ivan Morison, Scoli Acosta, Pilar Albarracín, Pierre Alechinsky, Guido Anderloni, Chiho Aoshima, Nobuyoshi Araki, Stefano Arienti, Donald Baechler, Enrico Baj, Giacomo Balla, Baya, Bill Beckley, Andrea Belvedere, Joseph Beuys, Richard Billingham, Ross Bleckner, Karl Blossfeldt, Enrica Borghi, Bernie Boston, Louise Bourgeois, Laetitia Bourget, Abrahm Brueghel, Ste'phane Calais, Letizia Cariello, Felice Casorati, Miguel Chevalier, Mat Collishaw, Fabrizio Corneli, Johan Creten, Gregory Crewdson, Giuliana Cune'az, Andrew Dadson, Baldassarre De Caro, Giorgio de Chirico, Nicola De Maria, Filippo De Pisis, Marco Del Re, Wim Delvoye, Fortunato Depero, Rä di Martino, Nathalie Djurberg, Emmanuelle Dupont, Massimo D'Azeglio, Keith Edmier, Walker Evans, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Thierry Feuz, Ettore Fico,Franco Fontana, Lucio Fontana, Pia Fries, Francesca Gabbiani, Franco Garelli, Mark Garry, Domenico Gatti, Dominique Gauthier, Romano Gazzera, Gelitin, Ori Gersht, Andy Goldsworthy, Trevor Gould, Rolf Graf, Dianne Hagen, Richard Hamilton, Florence Henri, Guillaume Janot, Sarah Jones, kim Joon, Ma Jun, Markus Karstiess, Alex Katz, Ellsworth Kelly, Jiri Kovanda, Filippo La Vaccara, Marie-Jo Lafontaine, Wolfgang Laib, Jacopo Ligozzi, Urs Lüthi, Alice Maher, Robert Mapplethorpe, Corinne Marchetti , Jose 'Maria Sicilia, Piero Martina, Tony Matelli, Ana Mendieta, Luigi Miradori known as "Il Genovesino", Helen Mirra, Joan Mitchell, Tina Modotti, Aldo Mondino, Giorgio Morandi, Yasumasa Morimura, Paul Morrison, Jean-Luc Moule'ne , Ugo Mulas, Takashi Murakami, Paolo Mussat Sartor, Nils-Udo, Jacques Nimki, Nordic Painter,Mario Nuzzi known as Mario De 'Fiori, Enzo Obiso, Bruno Pelassy, ​​Diego Perrone, Jack Pierson, Rob Pruitt, Chen Qiulin, Antonio Rasio, Tobias Rehberger, Luca Rento, Derek Rowleiei, David Salle, Salvo, Sam Samore, Tomas Saraceno, Adrian Schiess, Franck Scurti, Luigi Serralunga, Shirana Shahbazi, Kishin Shinoyama, Kiki Smith, Wieki Somers, Howard Sooley, Lorenz Spring, Christoph Steinmeyer, Jessica Stockholder, Kate Street, Christine Streuli, Bernardo Strozzi, Thomas Struth, Grazia Toderi, Arturo Tosi, Janaina Tschäpe, Cy Twombly, Luisa Valentini, Juan Van der Hamen y Leon, Ruud van Empel, Laura Viale, Guillaume Viaud, Andy Warhol, James Welling, Pae White, Sue Williams, Jeanine WoollardDavid Salle, Salvo, Sam Samore, Tomas Saraceno, Adrian Schiess, Franck Scurti, Luigi Serralunga, Shirana Shahbazi, Kishin Shinoyama, Kiki Smith, Wieki Somers, Howard Sooley, Lorenz Spring, Christoph Steinmeyer, Jessica Stockholder, Kate Street, Christine Streuli, Bernardo Strozzi, Thomas Struth, Grazia Toderi, Arturo Tosi, Janaina Tschäpe, Cy Twombly, Luisa Valentini, Juan Van der Hamen y Leon, Ruud van Empel, Laura Viale, Guillaume Viaud, Andy Warhol, James Welling, Pae White, Sue Williams, Jeanine WoollardDavid Salle, Salvo, Sam Samore, Tomas Saraceno, Adrian Schiess, Franck Scurti, Luigi Serralunga, Shirana Shahbazi, Kishin Shinoyama, Kiki Smith, Wieki Somers, Howard Sooley, Lorenz Spring, Christoph Steinmeyer, Jessica Stockholder, Kate Street, Christine Streuli, Bernardo Strozzi, Thomas Struth, Grazia Toderi, Arturo Tosi, Janaina Tschäpe, Cy Twombly, Luisa Valentini, Juan Van der Hamen y Leon, Ruud van Empel, Laura Viale, Guillaume Viaud, Andy Warhol, James Welling, Pae White, Sue Williams, Jeanine WoollardCy Twombly, Luisa Valentini, Juan Van der Hamen y Leon, Ruud van Empel, Laura Viale, Guillaume Viaud, Andy Warhol, James Welling, Pae White, Sue Williams, Jeanine WoollardCy Twombly, Luisa Valentini, Juan Van der Hamen y Leon, Ruud van Empel, Laura Viale, Guillaume Viaud, Andy Warhol, James Welling, Pae White, Sue Williams, Jeanine Woollard

Promoted by: Piedmont Region
Municipality of Verbania
Tai Onlus Cultural Association, Turin
With the patronage of: Ministry for Cultural and Environmental Heritage
With the contribution of: Banca del Piemonte

Organization: Tai Onlus Cultural Association, Turin

Catalog: Silvana Editoriale with texts by Anna Bondi, Andrea Busto, Roberto Carretta, Pierangelo Cavanna, Luca Morosi, Margherita Zalum Cardon

Organizing secretariat: Stefania Inverso, Luca Morosi

Information, Verbania Tourist Office reservations and groups: tel. 0323. 503249

Press office: Giuseppe Galimi
Tai - Turin Art International. Turin tel. +39 011 7640258 e-mail: [email protected]

Inauguration Sunday 24 May at 11.00

CRAA - Center for Current Art Research - Villa Giulia
Corso Zanitello 8 - 28922 Verbania-Pallanza
Hours: Wednesday to Friday 15 - 22
Saturday and Sunday 11 - 22
Admission: full 5 euro
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