Fabio Mauri. Gli anni dell’Aquilacurated by Maurizio Cattelan and Marta Papini

An exhibition curated by a distinguished team, paying tribute to Fabio Mauri, a central figure in 20th-century Italian art and thought, on the centenary of his birth (1926–2009).

The exhibition traces the twenty years the artist, writer and intellectual spent in L’Aquila, from 1979 to 1999, whilst he taught ‘Aesthetics of Experimentation’ at the Academy of Fine Arts in L’Aquila. That role gave rise to a deep bond with the city, its students and the local area – a relationship that left its mark both on his own artistic practice and on the cultural history of L’Aquila.

Through a selection of works created during these years, the exhibition today conveys the full critical force of Mauri’s research, which has always focused on the relationship between image, ideology and historical memory, and on the mechanisms through which representations influence individual and collective consciousness.

Works created between thirty and forty years ago, yet still capable of speaking to the present with great clarity: Europe’s ambiguous and liminal position, suspended between idyll and extermination; the link between art and politics; the memory of the atrocities of war and the temptation to repress them; the dangerous allure of fascist ideology. Viewing these works means accepting an uncomfortable position: that of someone who becomes both a witness to and an accomplice in the horrors and the oblivion of history.

And it is precisely within this tension between the gaze and responsibility that the entire exhibition unfolds, which does not follow a chronological order. Rather, it unfolds as a sequence of images that accumulate in the viewer’s mind through associations, references and contrasts. This is the same logic as Io sono un ariano (I Am an Aryan), the artist’s final published work, released in the year of his death and the centrepiece of the entire exhibition. A book consisting almost entirely of images – a visual diary – it is presented in its entirety in the exhibition to create an experience that also draws on Fabio Mauri’s own life.

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