Fabio Mauri. Amore Mio at the gallery Hauser & Wirth Zürich Limmatstrasse is the first solo presentation in Switzerland on the seminal Italian artist (1926 – 2009). The exhibition was organized with Olivier Renaud-Clément in collaboration with Studio Fabio Mauri and highlights a period of Fabio Mauri’s work in which he explored visual aspects of Pop Art. The exhibition includes paintings, sculptures and works on paper spanning the late 1950s to the mid 1970s, as well as the installation Amore Mio (1970), on view for the first time in over 50 years. In this video, Georgia von Albertini and Olivier Renaud-Clément guide us through the exhibition and show us some of the highlights of the show.
Fabio Mauri: Amore Mio / Hauser & Wirth Zürich Limmatstrasse. Zürich (Switzerland), September 30, 2023.
Fabio Mauri: Amore Mio / Hauser & Wirth Zürich Limmatstrasse. Zürich (Switzerland), September 30, 2023.
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CreativityTranscript
00:00 So this is the fourth exhibition of Fabio Maori that Hauser & Wurst is presenting.
00:20 We've worked with the family in the estate of Fabio Maori for about eight years now,
00:26 I believe.
00:27 This is the first show that is not as thematic as the previous one.
00:31 It tends to work in series with a huge body of works around one thematic.
00:37 And this show here is trying to unveil the pop art aspect of his work since Fabio worked
00:46 since 1957 until the time of his death in 2009.
00:52 I encountered the work during Caroline Christophe Bacardi's Documenta 13 in Kassel.
01:01 I was kind of smitten and blown away and we ended up taking him on board at the gallery.
01:11 So this show explores various times, mostly the early work starting in 1957 to about the
01:20 mid-70s, I would say, with all kinds of media and medium from film to painting, silkscreen
01:28 and sculpture.
01:32 And the Maori was a seminal Italian artist who was born in 1926.
01:38 So he was also a generation who of course witnessed the advent of fascism and the war.
01:46 This was very, very traumatizing for him and also became a very important topic in his
01:51 work.
01:53 So a lot of his work deals with ideology, with politics, but also with how media operates
02:01 and how media is used to disseminate ideology.
02:05 In this exhibition, as Olivier mentioned, the focus is really on Maori's populated works.
02:12 So of course the notion of media is very interesting also in the context of pop because media is
02:18 used to disseminate popular culture.
02:22 Some of Maori's most iconic works in the show are his so-called skerni.
02:29 These are screens.
02:33 Maori picks up on the shape and the rounded edges of a TV screen.
02:40 All the cinema screens.
02:42 So here you have two important works.
02:45 The two major works are the early one, this one, which is more like a cinema screen, in
02:50 fact, 1957, and the small one over there, the sculptural painting, which is a screen
02:56 also from 1957, which is really when he starts developing this concept and this idea, which
03:04 he uses throughout his career pretty much.
03:08 Maori's idea in also highlighting the physicality of the screen itself consists in rendering
03:16 the mechanisms of media visible.
03:19 So normally when we look at the screen, we look at the content that is projected onto
03:23 the screen or showed on the screen, right?
03:27 Watching TV, we forget about the TV itself.
03:29 And Maori's doing the precise opposite.
03:31 So he strips the screen bare of any content and narration and shows it in its naked and
03:38 original form.
03:40 Sometimes his screens have the very iconic words, "The end," or in Italian, "fine."
03:52 So with these two works here, Leo Castelli, this is clearly, I guess you could say the
03:58 beginning of the battle.
03:59 It's not really a battle, but it's how you define a part, who's the first, and is that
04:06 really important or not.
04:07 So in 1964, Rauschenberg is awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, while Italians
04:16 such as Fabio Maori or Schifano were already working with the idea of a pop element or
04:25 something very colorful or cartoony or whatever.
04:28 With Maori, it's a natural in a way because he's part of a family of publishers who are
04:32 the first one to invite and to bring Walt Disney to Italy, for instance.
04:36 So he is very close to this world in a way.
04:40 Leo Castelli epitomized the idea of the pop with the artist he represents.
04:44 He's also Italian, as you pointed out before, but he's in America.
04:50 Same thing for Al Capone behind me, which is from Italian descent and a mafioso in Chicago.
04:58 Yeah, so often in this exhibition, there is an emphasis on the relationship between Italy
05:07 and the United States.
05:09 So commonly people associate pop art with the United States, but of course it is a movement
05:13 that was also very strong and extremely interesting in Europe.
05:17 And Maori, not without humor, also hints at this complicated relationship between the
05:23 United States and Europe in this regard.
05:26 Here America is present via two modified US flags.
05:33 Again, the use of vibrant color that we also see in this series titled "Gangster" that
05:39 figures the prominent and very notorious figure of Al Capone.
05:45 And in this section of the exhibition, we turn towards a topic that very much relates
05:51 to Fabio Mauri's screens.
05:53 So as we said before, he really renders the physical component of the screen visible.
06:01 Here he uses the light of the cinematic projection as a material for his sculpture.
06:09 So again, just like the screen that kind of disappears behind the projection, the light
06:14 cone itself is often invisible as we focus on consuming the content itself.
06:19 But Mauri flips these mechanisms and puts the emphasis on the mediatic machinery and
06:26 on how it is constructed.
06:27 So these are really, really stunning and beautiful sculptures.
06:46 So this very, very iconic work is titled "L'intellettuale."
06:50 It's from the mid-1970s.
06:51 And it is both about friendship and about authorship.
06:57 So it is a piece for which Mauri projected Pier Paolo Pasolini's movie "Il Vangelo secondo
07:04 Matteo" onto Pier Paolo Pasolini.
07:07 And the images on the wall testify to that.
07:11 So on the one hand, friendship because Fabio Mauri and Pasolini were very close friends.
07:18 In fact, Mauri was deeply, deeply rooted in a group of intellectuals in Italy at the time
07:23 and was very, very much part of also the cinematic, but the political discourses that were relevant
07:29 at his time.
07:31 And authorship because rather than the author disappearing behind his work, here the work
07:37 itself is projected onto the author.
07:40 And the physicality of the body of the author becomes the surface for the projection of
07:46 the work.
07:49 So this one is, just because it's a very nice object, it's a prototype for actually a public
07:56 sculpture which was never made, but it's a hand torch basically and the light beam is
08:02 solidified as well.
08:04 This is from 1970.
08:09 And it was a work done for an exhibition that Achille Bonito Oliva organized.
08:18 Yeah, so this title of this work, "Amore Mio" as Olivier said, is also the title of our show
08:28 here.
08:29 This is a really seminal work.
08:31 It's an immersive and interactive installation that consists of 18 large silkscreen canvases
08:39 that together form this colorful space that the visitor can navigate by means of light.
08:46 So again, Maori reminds us of the function of light, perspective, and visibility.
08:55 We only see the parts of the work that we actively steer towards and the rest remains
09:01 invisible.
09:03 This work is very interesting to think of in conjunction with the statement by Maori
09:09 that says, in fact, he kind of felt like the entire world is a projection because all of
09:16 us humans are always only able to discern what our sociocultural lens allows us to see.
09:24 So there is always something that will remain in the dark.
09:27 [BLANK_AUDIO]