The Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee – museo Madre presents, from September 17 to November 17, the exhibition ‘Pietro Lista. In controluce’, curated by Renata Caragliano. The show retraces fifty years of the career of the artist, born in Umbria (Castiglione del Lago, 1941), who has lived and worked in Campania since 1954.
Amid ‘signs of light,’ the exhibition ‘Pietro Lista. In controluce’ highlights the work of the theatrical, chameleon-like figure with a voracious appetite for knowledge. The title of the exhibition has a double meaning: on the one hand, it invites the viewer to look at the artist’s work ‘against the light,’ but also and above all to emphasize Pietro Lista’s ‘encounter with light’, a light that emerges from darkness but always retains its memory, abstract, artificial, shadowless.
The exhibition project, the result of two years of research carried out in close collaboration with the artist and his archive, is organized into five thematic sections. These focus on specific aspects of Pietro Lista’s practice, highlighting his way of creating ever new and unpredictable connections and relationships of meaning among his works, thereby constructing a highly personal creative universe.
The present exhibition spans Lista’s more than fifty-year career, presenting both historical works, starting from the second half of the 1960s, as well as recent and often previously unseen works. They document the artist’s production, distinguished by a wide variety of themes and by his ongoing experimentation with techniques and materials ranging from painting, drawing, sculpture, and printmaking to performance. Each of the five sections of the exhibition considers a number of aspects of Lista’s production that recur and coexist at different times. It begins with works and performances that deal with ‘light,’ a source that continuously ignites and extinguishes the artist’s creative energy and accompanies him almost like a guiding spirit. But Lista’s journey through the world continues through other recurring themes in his research: the ‘Nuvole’ (Clouds), ‘Nero di Marte’ (Black of Mars), the ‘Corpi acefali’ (Headless Bodies) and the artist’s ‘refound’ head. The exhibition also dedicates space to his public artworks, documented through archival photographs and a video.
The exhibition is part of the Madre Museum’s initiatives, whose main objective is the creation of an archive of contemporary art from Southern Italy. Within this framework, works by Italian and international artists can engage in a rich and fruitful dialogue of diverse and complementary experiences, serving as the foundation for further initiatives of promotion and enhancement.
Pietro Lista exhibited in the group show at Galleria Numero in Florence (1962) and at the Cine Club in Naples (1965), up to the landmark exhibition ‘Arte Povera più Azioni Povere’ in Amalfi (1968), curated by Germano Celant. In the 1970s he expanded his international presence: a solo show at Galleria Bosquet in Paris (1971), participation in the 8th Paris Biennale (1973), the 10th Quadriennale in Rome (1975), the Premio Michetti (1978), and ‘Livres d’art et d’artistes’ at Galleria NRA in Paris (1980). In the 1980s he held a solo exhibition at Galleria Trans/Form in Paris (1983) and took part in the group show ‘Pole Position’ at Galerie K in Tokyo. After an intense period of activity in Italy, in 2000 he presented the exhibition ‘Interni’ at Galeria d’art 33 in Barcelona, followed by the retrospective in Cava de’ Tirreni (2004), his participation in the Premio Artemisia (2006), and the exhibition at Palazzo del Senato in Milan (2007). In 2010 he was featured in Hong Kong with ‘Homage by Pietro Lista’, and in 2011 at the Italian Pavilion of the 54th Venice Biennale.
