Galleria Milano is glad to present La porta senza porta («The Door Without a Door»), a solo exhibition of Amalia Del Ponte.
Amalia Del Ponte attended the sculpture class of Marino Marini at Accademia di Brera between 1956 and 1961. Since the very beginning, her research focused on geometric shapes, on materials and the endless possibilities they offer: she chose Plexiglas as the medium of her first sculptures, named Tropi by Vittorio Fagone on the occasion of the artist’s solo exhibit at Galleria Vismara in 1967. In the meantime, Del Ponte worked as an interior designer, showing «a peculiar sense of space, as well as an original constructivism meant to be destabilizing, uncanny» (E. Fiorani), as in her project for the first Elio Fiorucci store in Milan (1967). In 1973 she obtained her first international acknowledgement, as she won the First Prize for Sculpture at the São Paulo Art Biennale (participating on invitation of Umbro Apollonio and Bruno Munari) for her work Area Percettiva, an ‘environment’ experimenting with the feeling of void. In 1995, Gillo Dorfles dedicated an entire room to her work in the Italian Pavillion at the 46th Venice Biennale, where she exhibited her sound-making stones, Litofoni. In 2010, at Isola della Certosa in the Venetian Lagoon, she conceived Regno dei possibili invisibili, a video-installation featuring «portholes through which the Lagoon beneath the island appeared; four “dives” into the water concealed under our feet … The strange creatures that pass through one after the other not only vibrate and move; they also whisper, shout and swish» (A,M, Souzeau Boetti).
The title of the current exhibition, «The Door without a Door», is a kōan, a form of Zen meditation consisting of a logical paradox, intended to arouse our inner awareness. In the first room we have Potnia, a «lithophone» made in 1989. «Potnia» is an Indo-European term meaning «lady», used in Homer’s Iliad in association with Artemis, to indicate her ability to tame wild animals. A lithophone is a particular stone that produces sound when strained with specific percussion tools; in this case, the sound is intertwined with that of a harp. Il nano illuminante (2014) consists of a tiny dot of light within an excessively large frame, meant to reflect on the revolution of nanotechnology.
The second room houses the installation Ars Memoriae (2014), a loose interpretation of several writings of Giordano Bruno on the subject of memory. «Ars memoriae» was a technique used in Classical antiquity to evoke a discourse through an organized sequence; Bruno went well beyond that, as he considered it to be not only a tool for rhetoric, but rather an instrument of knowledge. He associated images to alphabetical characters and mythological figures: through the different combinations of mental images and mythological figures, it is possible to arouse imagination and take possession «of the shadows and marks ideas have left on the world» (G. Bruno). The artwork allows the viewer to experience such mechanism.
In the boiserie room, the previously-unseen Il pasto nudo (2014) is inspired by the eponymous novel by William S. Burroughs, The Naked Lunch, recreating some of its symbols and suggestions.
The literary, scientific and technological stimuli continuously inspiring Amalia del Ponte’s imagination cannot be classified within an univocal formal style. The artist’s boundless innate curiosity brought her to a strenuous experimentation, both refined and lyrical. Such lyricism is able to provoke the viewer in a subtle, always discrete way, and the heterogeneity of both materials and techniques is the result of a coherent, consistent method, as this exhibit clearly shows. It is a literary tale, one that begins with the attempt to acknowledge, explain and therefore dominate nature – so typical of archaic Indo-European culture – and continues through the even more remote territories of the human mind, as in the work based on Giordano Bruno’s memorization techniques. It culminates with Burroughs’ psycho-physical experiments and finally reaches the infinitely small – or infinitely large – world of nanotechnology.
A selection of videos and footage of sound performances will also be on display.
On the occasion of the exhibition, the catalogue of the artist’s works will be presented.
