Exhibition
Sunday 30 May 2021 - Sunday 20 February 2022
POINT OF EQUILIBRIUMThought Space Light from Toyo Ito to Ettore Spalletti
curated by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi and Margherita Guccione
This first exhibition inaugurating MAXXI L’Aquila is dedicated to Ettore Spalletti, and his is one of the eight works that have been commissioned from as many artists for this occasion. Spalletti chose the chapel and created one of his most moving and successful works which will remain in the museum permanently. In the small chapel on the first floor, the artist has inserted a column in the centre of the space in conjunction with the lantern of the dome above. A column of light projecting upwards solidifies into a perfect cylinder: thought, space, light.
The entire exhibition unfolds on these premises, placing the site-specific works in dialogue with works from the MAXXI collection of art, architecture and photography.
The point of equilibrium is a statement: it has an ethical and aesthetic, political and social meaning. In a period of great upheavals, emergencies, dramas, uncertainty and confusion, art helps us to find a balance, an existential stability which in this case reflects on a concrete abstraction, the abstraction of a thought that becomes real in form, light and space.
An itinerary where the works interact with the context that surrounds them – with the architecture, the city, the landscape – and which reflect on the value and meaning of equilibrium understood as the moment in which all the forces that intervene on a structure in a given instant impart the same opposing force, cancelling each other out: a break in tension, the moment of art and the founding principle of architecture. The works enter on tiptoe, quietly and with respect for the place, its past and recent history, and connect with the building, the entire city and the territory, for imagining other balances between the forces that rule the world.
New commissions
Elisabetta Benassi, Stefano Cerio, Daniela De Lorenzo, Alberto Garutti, Nunzio, Paolo Pellegrin, Anastasia Potemkina, Alessandro Sciarroni, Ettore Spalletti
MAXXI Art, Architecture and Photography Collection
Salvatore Arancio, Allora & Calzadilla, Olivo Barbieri, Gabriele Basilico, Alighiero Boetti, Monica Bonvicini, Maurizio Cattelan, Giovanni Chiaramonte, DEMOGO, Yona Friedman, Guido Guidi, Toyo Ito, Hassan Khan, William Kentridge, Bernard Khoury, Maria Lai, Piero Manzoni, MoDus, Juan Muñoz, Giovanni Michelucci, Liliana Moro, Maurizio Nannucci, Walter Niedermayr, Giulio Paolini, Franco Purini e Laura Thermes, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Aldo Rossi, Maurizio Sacripanti, Superstudio, Luca Trevisani.
