The fire of the Earth., Exhibition Stelline Foundation, Milan

closed

The fire of the Earth.:

Annunziata Scipione.

From 11 July to 30 July 2019

Stelline Foundation

Corso Magenta, 61, Milan

Closed today: open Tuesday at 06:30

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From the 11th to the 30th of July 2019, the Stelline Foundation hosts the exhibition The Fire of the Earth. Annunziata Scipione, the second stage of an exhibition project dedicated to Annunziata Scipione (1928 - 2018), one of the most interesting representatives of contemporary Italian naїve art, widely considered the true heir of Antonio Ligabue. Among the greatest admirers of Scipione was the great writer and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, who loved to call her a "peasant artist" and recognized in her "a fundamental dialectical quality that (...) has the value of a created language". The Abruzzese artist powerfully represents the collective unconscious of a community, its need to recognize itself in archetypes, traditions, continuities that form a horizon of meaning, and merges it with her own desire to belong to a place, to be rooted in a land, to search for a horizon in which to position oneself. It is the affirmation of the value of places, memory, and identity. The exhibition path presents about fifty works including paintings and sculptures and is accompanied by the most important publication ever made on Scipione to date: a rich monograph (edited by Silvia Pegoraro, with texts by the curator and Valentina Muzii, accompanied by a critical anthology) presenting almost 450 works, effectively constituting the first general catalog of the artist. The exhibition and editorial project propose, therefore, a double path through the entire work of Annunziata Scipione, from 1968 to the most recent expressive phase, which ended only a few months before her passing on April 24, 2018. Scipione's artistic work began to take shape systematically between the late 1960s and the early 1970s (the first sculptures are from '68 and she started painting in '72). "For the relatively late emergence of her artistic inclination, her story is similar to that of the most famous among American naїve artists: Anna Mary Robertson Moses, known as Grandma Moses (1860-1961), whose paintings have been exhibited in the most important American museums, including the MoMa in New York," as Silvia Pegoraro writes. "Annunziata Scipione is, perhaps, to be placed at the extreme limit of the naїve area, for the complexity of her vision and for the anthropological-cultural reflection that appears to underlie it. Her works speak to us of the strength and richness of a female personality that has pursued with vigor and serene determination the affirmation of her most authentic and profound vocation," continues the curator. The immense pictorial work of the artist also constitutes a sort of encyclopedic diary of customs, work activities, secular and religious traditions of the archaic-rural society of the places where she was born and lived, very similar, moreover, to those of all Italy until the post-war period. A "documentary" that takes shape in fairy-tale colors, albeit pervaded by a solid and crystalline sense of reality and belonging to one's own land.