Betty Woodman at Museo Marino Marini
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Museo Marino Marini, Florence (IT) Betty Woodman at Museo Marino Marini In her more than sixty years of career – 45 of which were spent living halfway between New York and Antella, a hamlet of Bagno a Ripoli – Betty Woodman has been recognized internationally as one of the most significant and influential contemporary artists. Her career began in 1950, when she took on the profession of ceramist with the intention of creating objects whose beauty could enrich everyday life. Since then, the “vase” shape has become an object of study for her, as well as her inspiration and basis for production. To deconstruct and rebuild its form, she created a complex and exuberant body of ceramic sculpture that distinguishes itself for the wide range of influences and traditions, often experienced firsthand during her numerous trips. Over the years, through work that invokes and at the same time challenges the traditional elements of Italian ceramicists, the American artist has imaginatively reinvented the very concept of ceramics, finding her personal and highly authorial place within the contemporary art scene. It is no coincidence that her most recent works – the last 15 years of work covered by the exhibition – has played a vital role for at least one generation of young artists, who have taken her experimental approach that is still respectful of the tradition. Even though ceramics remains the alpha and omega of her artistic dictionary, through the use of bright colors and eccentric shapes, her works have progressively gone beyond the boundaries of decorative art to forcefully enter into the area of the visual arts, often crossing boundaries into painting: in Woodman’s work, a vessel can take the forms of human bodies and animal figures, pillows or flowers, compare a history of different cultures – from Greece to China with Aztec, Etruscan, or Roman references, ranging to the Italian Renaissance or casting classical architectural shadows on objects illuminated by the light of European Pop Art (without ever forgetting the debt to American painting of the 1970s). It is a mix of ceramics and painting, made even more explicit by the recent addition of canvasses with three-dimensional elements, and intentionally emphasized in this exhibition: here Woodman’s works could be directly compared with Marino Marini’s sculptures, on the one hand – through a staging, in the mezzanine of the museum, which highlights the synergies – and on the other, with the heroic painting adventure of the Florentine Quattrocento – the 15th-century – specially echoed by the work that opens the exhibition, named Of Botticelli from 2013. The exhibition is curated by Vincenzo de Bellis, with Nicola Ricciardi as assistant curator. After the Marino Marini Museum, the show will have a second stop at the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) in London, from February 2 to April 10, 2016, where it will be re-organized and restaged. For the double exhibition, a monograph on the artist will also be published, with the purpose of reinterpreting the developments and rediscovering her role within the history of American painting from the second half of the twentieth century to today. |
