With the double solo show dedicated to the two artists, the “GAM” of Turin reiterates the new project for the display of the “Collections” of the Bertola era
Until March 16, 2025
Light, color, time. These are the three essential elements on which the project begins “new GAM” of Turin; the three themes which inspire the new display of the “Permanent Collections”, as understood by the director (appointed last February) Chiara Bertola. A journey that with the two new exhibitions dedicated to Mary Heilmann ea Maria Morganti – whose inauguration follows by a few days the one dedicated to “Berthe Morisot. Impressionist painter” (the only woman among the founders of the movement of “New Painting”) – adds a new important piece to a project which in Heilmann and Morganti’s abstract figures (worlds of color that shed light on body, time, totality of life, existence and profession) finds new and fertile lifeblood to open up to the “new” future . Both inaugurated on Tuesday 29 October, both will continue until Sunday 16 March next year.
Per Mary Heilmannborn in San Francisco in 1940 and certainly among the most important contemporary abstract painters, the one in the spaces of the “GAM”, curated by Bertola herself and created with the collaboration of the “Studio Heilmann”of New York, is the first Italian solo show and practically retraces, through a sixty workshis entire career, from the first geometric paintings of the 70s to the recent “shaped canvases” in fluorescent colors. In those bright reds, in the yellows and greens and in the intense blues – mixed with large backgrounds often in explosive and heterodox contrasts, where the chromatic magma is an intense force of the brushstroke or of a very perceptible manual gesture, often overflowing beyond the frame of the ‘work to take the form of wandering satellites of color or excerpts of glazed ceramics – there is her whole life, her being a woman and an artist in times of intolerant “counterculture”, by “free speech movement – Bertola notes – of that ‘surfing’ spirit of his native California, which even anticipated the ‘beat’ culture and subsequent movements challenging the system”.
The oldest painting in the review, “Chinatown” from 1976, takes its title from the difficult neighborhood where Heilmann lived his first years in New York; to follow “French Screen” e “The Rosetta Stone I” (both ’78) with “Robert’s Garden” (1983). Works where the influence of the great masters of “abstract” is clear, first and foremost the Dutch Piet Mondrianfounder of “The Style” and author of works often trivialized for their “apparent” geometric “simplicity”. A screen of “complexity” which is the result, however, of a continuous search for balance and formal perfection, carried forward and evolved over the course of a lifetime. A destiny that Chiara Bertola feels she can share, in part with the works of Mary Heilmann, which never arrived in Italy, “works that have escaped understanding and whose full intelligence has not been grasped, thus remaining ‘timeless’ and ‘out of time’ … whose strength and joyfulness have not been sufficiently experienced live”.
Like those present in the exhibition and created from the 80s to today, sharing the culture of the time, the love for music and cinema, for road movievideo games and oceanic landscapes with bright greens and disheveled grays (“Tube at Dusk”, 2022) in which matter becomes a lump of memory and repeated, scratchy life experiences.
Nell’“essentiality of the pictorial gesture” e “in its repetition and expansion over time” instead, the works brought to the exhibition rotate, and created between 1988 and 2024, by the Milanese (Venetian by adoption) Maria Morganti. Cared for and strongly desired by Elena Volpatothe exhibition literally and concretely brings the heart of the artist’s studio to the center of the exhibition space (“Luogogesto”operates itself), “a physical and mental place, where time can be given shape through the simplicity of daily acts which compose, by slow accumulation, the complex chromatic diary of an existence”.
Place where every morning, the painter creates a new color from the depths of her myth “bowl”a precious treasure chest of that “chromatic slime” that has remained there, mixed and reshuffled for years, heir to the gestures of the Venetian school of color and natural leaven to his creations. Come on “Comparisons” with the masters of the past, to his own “Diary” (and “artist-archivist”as it was defined) and its “Sedimentations” of everyday time and historical time. Until his “Infinite picture”created every day, layer after layer, since 2006. To “infinity”, in fact.
Gianni Milani
“Mary Heilmann – Maria Morganti”
GAM-Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, via Magenta 31; tel. 011/4429518 or www.gamtorino.it
Until March 16, 2025
Hours: Tuesday – Sun. 10/18. Closed on Mondays
In the photos: Mary Heilmann: “InstallationView”, Ph. Nicola Morittu; Maria Morganti: “InstallatioView”, Ph. Luca Vianello and Silvia
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