Participating artists:
Carlo Alfano (Napoli, 1932 – 1990) / Thomas Bayrle (Berlino, 1937) / Luciano Fabro (Torino, 1936 – Milano, 2007) / Simone Fattal (Damasco, 1942) / Giorgia Garzilli (Napoli, 1992) / Eva Giolo (Bruxelles, 1991) / Piero Golia (Napoli, 1974) / Mimmo Jodice (Napoli, 1934 – 2025) / Rashid Johnson (Chicago, 1977) / Allan Kaprow (Atlantic City, 1927 – Encinitas, 2006) / Rosa Panaro (Casal di Principe, 1935 – Napoli, 2022) / Lorenzo Scotto di Luzio (Pozzuoli, 1972) / Cindy Sherman (New Jersey, 1954) Frances Stark (Newport Beach, 1967) / Eric Wesley (Los Angeles, 1973)
The ongoing exhibition format titled Gli anni is broken down into chapters and dedicated to exploring episodes from the history of art in Naples over recent decades. The Madre collection interacts with major public and private collections here, largely from the city itself, to re-evoke key moments and artistic productions that have taken place in the area through emblematic works. The first chapter of the exhibition was held from December 19, 2024 to June 30, 2025.
The title Gli anni refers to the novel of the same name by writer Annie Ernaux (The Years), winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature, in which the description of photographs and memories of important moments in a single life become both an autobiographical fresco and a collective and historiographical chronicle. The novel warns that private images and memories are destined to disappear in the ebb and flow of history, while this exhibition sets out to consider works of art as an antidote to this process of dissolution. Over time, once the urgency of the relationship with the current events in which they were conceived has subsided, the works may recount both their own aesthetic and linguistic research and the context in which they were produced and exhibited. In turn, the collections in which they are preserved may be viewed, from this stance, as repositories of stories, events, and passages embedded in shared experience.
The narrative that unfolds, punctuated by various moments and episodes, is signposted by the years in which the selected works were exhibited in Campania, i.e. when they became part of the shared memory that this exhibition celebrates. To complete this trajectory and confirm the vitality of Madre’s ongoing research into the present, Gli anni also includes artists exhibiting in Naples for the first time: for this second chapter, Eva Giolo. The experimental aspect continues further with an exhibition model featuring an artist from the Campania region, in this case Giorgia Garzilli, who is given the chance to curate a one-room exhibition drawing on the Madre collection, exploited here as a cultural and creative pool of reference material.
The exhibition itinerary, just like the structure of our own memories, is not chronological.
In order for each work to become not only an emblem of artistic research and a specific socio-political moment, but also an antidote to the disappearance of shared historical memory (a danger underlined by Ernaux), the exhibition has a real constituent element in its public program. During the exhibition period, meetings, conversations, and visits reflect the liveliness of the Neapolitan art scene in recent cultural history, contextualizing it in a broader historiographical perspective. The works on display thus become a palimpsest on which to construct historical-artistic, political, anthropological, and sociological narratives, in line with a notion of the museum as a place of transdisciplinary thought production.
