ROME, ITALY.- Two exhibitions, dedicated respectively to Eva Marisaldi (Bologna, 1966), who is presenting a new project, and to Michael Raedecker (Amsterdam, 1963), who is having his first solo museum show in Italy, opened in Rome, at the Centro nazionale per le arti contemporanee (the National Center for the Contemporary Arts).
The autumn program at the Center, proposed by curator Paolo Colombo, will focus on contemporary art. The spring program began with an emphasis on architecture and opened with a large-scale exhibition of the work of Zaha Hadid, in homage to this Anglo-Iraqi architect. In 1998 Hadid won the international competition for the design of the new museum, which will be built in the area of the former Montello barracks, on Via Guido Reni, scheduled for completion by 2005. The National Center for the Contemporary Arts plans to promote all types of current work that is tied to the fields of art and architecture, revolving around the two poles of the Museum of the XXI Century and the Museum of Architecture, which will constitute the Center’s permanent collections.
The Marisaldi and Raedecker exhibitions are the first in a series of ’side-by-side solo exhibitions’ that will continue until March 2003, with Giuseppe Caccavale and Francis Alÿs, and Margherita Manzelli and Kara Walker. The exhibitions are organized by the Office for Architecture and Contemporary Art (DARC), the Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali (Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities) and by the Centro nazionale per le arti contemporanee (National Center for the Contemporary Arts).
In her exhibition entitled Legenda ("Legend," a term that signifies "things that should be read," but which also is the nom-de guerre taken by German terrorists during the so-called "years of lead") "Eva Marisaldi," Paolo Colombo writes in the catalogue text, "presents a series of drawings embroidered onto large canvases (…) suspended from the ceiling. Among them, small speakers transmit phrases extrapolated from conversations heard on the street or taken from pre-existing texts. To complete the exhibition, the artist has designed a video room that is suspended from skylights covering the large space set aside for her work (…). The premise of the show is the existence of an internal observer who secretly observes society, aware but a non-participant in the cacophony of voices that are superimposed in the space between the suspended canvases, their interjections, and the questions and phrases that make up our habitual everyday communication."
The exhibition Instinction, the first solo exhibition in Italy by Michael Raedecker, will take place in February-April 2003, at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel. The Dutch artist will show some fifteen works from the past four years, created in unusual techniques that combine painting and embroidery. After he paints the canvases on the floor of his studio, the artist hangs them in mid-air from the ceiling, in order to be able to work on them with needle and thread. Then he places them on a table and pours liquid paint on the surfaces, which then condenses into three-dimensional painted grounds.
"In Michael Raedecker’s paintings," Paolo Colombo writes in the catalogue text, "landscapes and interiors are known territory: a house surrounded by trees, a window flanked by two curtains in an empty room that looks out over a garden, thick, deep carpeting, a building illuminated on the interior and surrounded by darkness. His vision of the world, abstract and austere, is made up of archetypes of houses (they don’t exist in reality) and an imaginary and harsh nature. By analogy, and drawing from our experience, we think that these images are more similar to film scenes than to the houses and gardens we usually inhabit."
Michael Raedecker’s exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue in Italian, English and German, conceived by the artist and designed by Schott & Schibig. It contains critical texts by Paolo Colombo, Jennifer Higgie and Philipp Kaiser, as well as some pages specifically conceived by Raedecker himself.
