ROMA, LONDON, Paris

14th February – 18th April 2004

ROME
Franco Angeli, Gianfranco Baruchello, Enrico Castellani, Mario Ceroli, Tano Festa, Renato Mambor, Mimmo Rotella, Mario Schifano

LONDON
Peter Blake, Gilbert & George, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney,
Allen Jones, Peter Phillips, Richard Smith, Joe Tilson

PARIS
Arman, César, Christo, François Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Alain Jacquet, Daniel Spoerri, Jacques Villeglé

David Hockney, Paul explaining pictures to Mie Kakigahava 1983, photo-collage on card, 89x114 cm

The show is a collection of work by 24 artists who have been working since the late Fifties/early Sixties in three European capitals: Rome, London and Paris. The show takes its name from one of Tano Festa’s paintings, and reflects the complex international situation of continuous cultural exchanges which took place in the positive climate of the Sixties. These artists have developed their own language and have managed to eradicate themselves from Informal painting, rejecting its essential, introspective characteristics, its devotion to the gesture and to matter. The result has been an a priori abandonment of painting, by recuperating materials and gathering objects from the outside world, such as in the tradition of Dada and Duchamps; or else the rendering of painting a cold, metallic medium, through which elements of everyday reality can be reconquered. 
The Rome part of the show centres fundamentally on the so-called “Piazza del Popolo School”, with the entry of Castellani and Baruchello, who represent the defeat of painting from the inside, in two opposed directions. The London part presents artists who in the late Fifties/early Sixties had links with the Royal College. From the Pop manifesto launched by Richard Hamilton in his famous collage presented in 1956 in the This is Tomorrow show at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, to the conceptual photographic experiments Gilbert & George. The Paris section concentrates on the artists who grouped themselves around the definition of Nouveaux Réalistes, a term coined by Pierre Restany in 1960.

Press office: Susanna Fabiani: catalogue and photographs available on request
susy@galleriailponte.com

Catalogue: 17x12 cm, 80 pages, 32 colour reproductions. Text by Andrea Alibrandi, Edizioni Il Ponte, Florence. Price: €10