Exactly sixty years after his first solo exhibition (Galleria La Feluca, Rome, November 1958), and just over thirty years after his last extensive retrospective in Rome (Museum of Castel Sant’Angelo, 1987), Ennio Calabria received an important tribute in 2018 with another great retrospective, which was strongly desired by Prof. Emmanuele F. M. Emanuele and presented at Palazzo Cipolla. The exhibition – promoted by Fondazione Terzo Pilastro - Internazionale and created by Poema, in collaboration with the State Archives of Calabria and the technical support of Civita Mostre – was curated by Gabriele Simongini. 

 

Approximately eighty works among paintings (some of which were created expressly for the occasion in 2018) and pastels are an account of the entire creative journey of this great artist of the Italian and European visionary and existential representation. Since 1958, the Roman artist has created works which are full of a complex and restless artistic vitality and an imaginative force that goes hand in hand with a very lucid philosophical and anthropological speculation. Surprising and very inventive in this last period, Calabria’s paintings manage to offer an image of the process of change of today’s society and of ourselves, almost prophetically depicting his possible future metamorphoses. First and foremost, he believes painting is a testimony, a metamorphic and complex living component into which the artist transfers all of himself, from deep within.

As Gabriele Simongini wrote, “Throughout sixty years of study, painting has always had a powerful social value for Calabria, in the broad sense, as a cognitive tool of the infinite transformations of a world that went from the Cold War to the current global domination of hi-tech corporations, and of a presently unrecognizable Italy, which has gone from the enthusiasm of reconstruction and the economic boom to the disorientation of today’s emblematic role of the European crisis. A painting of ‘history’, therefore, and albeit in a broad, etymological sense (ed. from the Latin ‘historia’, or ‘research, investigation, cognition’), never illustrative, with a profound identification between collective events and an inner autobiography.” 

 

Interested in grasping the symptoms and causes of the regression and the prevalence of a collective instinct, which tends towards aggressiveness and seems to correspond in contrast to an increasingly frenetic technological progress, Ennio Calabria believes that his paintings today “must be presented as something that you feel, not as something that is understood.”

Prof. Emmanuele F. M. Emanuele, President of Fondazione Terzo Pilastro - Internazionale, commented: “Ennio Calabria has been leading Italian and European Figurativism from the last century to the present, establishing himself as an absolute protagonist, always in line with his time. From the works of this artist – to whom I am particularly pleased to dedicate an anthology as rich and complete as the one we present here – emanate an energy and a vitality that are a reflection of his critical and passionate approach to the world around him. An attitude that results in an all-round quest on the existential condition of the contemporary individual and on the dynamics of an era in perpetual evolution.”

The exhibition starts with a very significant painting, Imponderabile nel circo (Imponderable in the circus), presented during the artist’s first solo exhibition in 1958, to then continue with his most famous masterpieces: La città che scende, 1963; Funerali di Togliatti, 1965, very rarely exhibited; Pantheon, 1978-79; Il Traghetto per Palermo, 1984; La città dentro, 1987; Eretto antropomorfo, 1993, and so on, while also reserving ample space for the works he created from 2000 to the present: Presentimento d’acqua and Ombre del futuro, 2008, Il pensiero nel corpo, 2010, Patologia della luce, 2012, L’Uomo e la Croce, 2016, and so on, to finally include the five unprecedented works from the last months of 2018. Particular attention was given to his portraits, such as Stalin, 1964; Mao Pianeta, 1968; Italo Calvino. Voglia di eterno, 2013, just to name a few, without forgetting those dedicated to Pope John Paul II, and also self-portraits, pastels, and a small selection of several posters created by Calabria over the years.

The catalogue, published by Silvana Editoriale, contains texts by Prof. Emanuele, Gabriele Simongini, Claudio Crescentini, Paola Di Giammaria, Ida Mitrano, an interview with Calabria by Marco Bussagli, as well as all the works on display, a selection of the artist’s writings (chosen and commented by Tiziana Caroselli), and an extensive bibliography. Furthermore, several of the most important documentaries and films dedicated to Ennio Calabria were shown during the exhibition. For the occasion, Raffaele Simongini created a video clip with which the artist welcomes and presents himself to visitors of the Palazzo Cipolla Museum.

 

Exhibition details

Ennio Calabria. Verso il tempo dell’essere. Opere 1958-2018 Curated by Gabriele Simongini

Dates
November 20th, 2018 to January 27th, 2019

Venue
Rome, Palazzo Cipolla
Via del Corso 320

 

Opening Hours Every day, except Monday, from 10 am to 8 pm (the ticket counter closes one hour before)

Holidays and Special Openings December 8th:  10 am to 8 pm
December 24th: closed
December 25th: 3 pm to 8 pm
December 26th: 10 am to 8 pm
December 31st: closed
January 1st:       3 pm to 8 pm
January 6th:      10 am to 8 pm

 

Tickets 

Full price:  € 7.00
Reduced:  € 5.00 - valid for ages up 26 years, adults over 65 years, law enforcement and military with ID, university students with student ID, journalists with Press Card, holders of affiliate cards: Fai, La Feltrinelli, Libraries of Rome, Touring Club Italiano.
Free admission: valid for children under 6 years of age, disabled visitors plus 1 chaperone, ICOM members, Lazio region tour guides with license.