Paolo Scheggi: Making Spaces
January 27th – 15th April 2023
Cardi Gallery | Milano
Corso di Porta Nuova, 38
20121 Milano
Italy
Paolo Scheggi, Making Spaces retraces Scheggi’s artistic research between the 1960s and ’70s through a selection of more than 25 works. For this occasion, the iconic immersive installation Interfiore, presented for the first time by Galleria La Tartaruga in 1968, is displayed again.
Signed on the verso lower right
Modules of enamelled metal
51 x 51 x 12 cm
20 1/8 x 20 1/8 x 4 3/4 in
Sixty years after two works by Paolo Scheggi (Intersuperfici) joined the collection of Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, directed by Palma Bucarelli at the time, and after the artist’s participation in the show Monocroma in Bologna and Florence, this exhibition aims to analyze his oeuvre from the Sixties to the Seventies of the last century, celebrating in particular 1963 considered the year in which Paolo Scheggi reached international recognition.
Zone riflesse, 1963
Signed, dated and titled on the verso upper left
Acrylic on superimposed canvases
80 x 80 x 6.5 cm
31 1/2 x 31 1/2 x 2 1/2 in
Making Spaces is the title of the exhibition displayed by Cardi Gallery in Milan in collaboration with Associazione Paolo Scheggi. From January 26th to April 15th, 2023 Cardi Gallery presents a selection of more than 25 works by Paolo Scheggi. The exhibition path, curated by Ilaria Bignotti, heads two directions intending to look into the integration of design and architecture elaborated in the spatial modules on which the most famous works by the artist are based, and to offer the public a broad view of Paolo Scheggi’s approach towards the concepts of interaction, interspace, and multimedia.
The exhibition was designed as a conversation between Intersuperfici, Inter-ena-cubi – works created with modules of die-cut cardboard and plexiglass, or with modules of enameled metal – architectural spaces and projects about the interaction between plastic and architecture – that are related to an interesting production process implemented by Scheggi between 1962 and 1971 thanks to his relations with Bruno Munari, Nizzoli Associati, Mario Brunati, and the collaborations with magazines such as Casabella, Domus and In – letters and design sketches, drawings, and maquettes, which constitute the theoretical part of his works.
Interfiore, 1968
Fluorescent paint on wooden rings and Wood’s light.
approx. 400 x 400 x 400 cm
For this occasion, the iconic immersive installation Interfiore (1968), consisting of 85 fluorescent wooden rings hanging in the dark and illuminated by Wood’s light, is displayed again. “Fontana wrote about his appreciation for those paintings that were so black, white, red, in a letter that predicted the intense and brilliant career that Scheggi would have achieved – stated the curator Ilaria Bignotti; a career which was confirmed again in 1963 with his first participation in an exhibition abroad: it was in Bruxelles, at the iconic Galerie Smith, when his Intersuperfici entered the international art scene.
This is more than enough to understand the scientific significance of the exhibition that Cardi Gallery is hosting in Milan, which is an important city for the career of the artist born in Florence: in Milan, Scheggi found an open laboratory where he experienced several artistic languages and media during a decade, going beyond all limits”.
The exhibition also covers the importance of many critics, designers, and manufacturers that worked with Scheggi, such as Germano Celant, Angelo Fronzoni, Alessandro Mendini, Gian Mario Oliveri, Giancarlo Sangregorio, and with whom the artist signed the 1965 typewritten book Ipotesi di lavoro per la progettazione totale, presented in Milan at the Collegio Regionale Lombardo degli Architetti; the exhibition also deals with Scheggi’s collaboration with Fabbrica Poggi on the production of “visual-plastic” objects for design purposes and with his role as visual advisor for relevant urban architectural planning contests between 1966 and 1969.
This exhibition takes place in a very vibrant time for what concerns the studies on Scheggi’s work, in which the concepts of interaction and interchange between space, gaze, and the time of perception and experience are placed at the center of an international conversation, as proved by the 2022 acquisition of a red enameled Inter-ena-cubo by London’s Tate Modern, that is being shown at Shangai’s (China) MAP- Museum of Art od Pudong in the exhibition The Dynamic Eye: Op and Kinetic Art from Tate Collection.
©2023 Cardi Gallery, Paolo Scheggi
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