Gianfranco Zappettini (bilingual edition): The Golden Age

Description

Gianfranco Zappettini (1939) is one of the most relevant living abstract Italian painters. He was one of the founders of the Analytic Painting international movement in the 1970s (across Italy, Germany, France, the Netherlands) and was exhibited in public museums in Europe (Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome, Westfalischer Kunstverein in Munster, Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris) and in "documenta 6" in Kassel in 1977. The London exhibition will display some completely new series of works, which all deal with the symbolic meaning of gold, not intended as a luxury material, but in a metaphysical sense of spiritual perfection. The works will have the colour gold as fil-rouge of the installation and will have eastern doctrines like Taosim, Zen and Sufism as philosophical ground, being Zappettini a deep connoisseur of them. As the artist states in the text he wrote for the catalogue, "while the time of myth is cyclical, there is also correspondence between past and future, between end and beginning, because what has been will necessarily repeat again. A new 'Golden Age' will follow the age in which we are living - a final epoch, degenerate and stripped of spirituality: this narrates the myth and this may prefigure art, capable of conserving the most profound values and, like myth, of passing the confines of time". The Turin exhibition will also display some other series from the past decades, namely the 1990s and the 2000s. The catalogue will also bear texts by Martin Holman, Klaus Honnef, Paola Valente.