Throughout the selection of some of the most significative artworks of the two first decades of this long career, the exhibition offers the possibility to critically reread the beginning of the artist Luca Maria Patella.
The exhibition takes the title of the first solo exhibition by Patella, held in Rome in 1968 at the gallery L’Attico, property of Fabio Sargentini.
In advance of the artistic and cultural trends that would emerge only in the following decades, Luca Maria Patella was in the first half of the sixties in Europe one of the pioneers of the artistic use of photography and film, often in relation with the natural space and the architecture.
The installations, the performance events, the photographic paintings, the films and the artist's books combine to outline the image of a “total” artist, creating unusual points of view from which to observe the changes of the surrounding world and the transformations of linguistic codes , in a crucial period of artistic practices of recent decades.
An integral part of the exhibition is the program of film shows realized in the sixties, presented in the Cinema Hall. The films, recently restored by the Cineteca Nazionale in Rome, show an experimental and proto-conceptual use of the film medium. The films in the exhibition are organized in collaboration with the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia - Cineteca Nazionale.
Biographical notes
Luca Maria Patella is one of the main protagonists of the visual arts in Italy in the last fifty years. He has a research that uses many different expressive and experimental media (from painting to installation, from photography to film, from video to sound, from the book to the computer and telematic networks), without ever losing the contact with a deep aesthetic and poetic matrix. Strongly influenced by the notions of astronomy, structural chemistry and analytical psychology, assimilated during the years of training in Rome and Paris, Patella has competed along its versatile artistic itinerary in a complex comparison between art and science, which - in close connection with the artistic practice - implies psychoanalytic, philosophical and linguistic theories. As for photography and film, and more in generally for the media, Patella was one of the first artists to deal structurally and experimentally this field in the early sixties. His productions and original inventions are to be understood in a "pre-conceptual" sense, as well as "behavioral", in a structured dialogue with history.
The exhibition, curated by Benedetta Carpi De Resmini and Stefano Chiodi, is promoted by Roma Capitale, Assessorato alla Cultura, Creatività, Promozione Artistica e Turismo - Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali, and realized by the support and collaboration of Fondazione Morra in Neaples, which curates his exhibitions and his general archive since years.