About Sculpture: from the material to the immaterial. Art between the 20th and 21st centuries: Rangga Aputra, Ronald Ventura, Ruben Pang
Thanks to the collaboration with the City of Lugano and the support of the Lugano Region, the city's galleries will be exhibited from May 18 to 21, 2023 in the Asilo Ciani, a recently restored historical building dating back to the end of the 19th century.
Founded in January 2023, the GAL Association brings together Lugano's art galleries that have worked in the sector for years and are an integral part of the city's cultural fabric. These galleries shared the project of working in synergy, with the constructive intention of presenting themselves as interlocutors for the public and the institutions, making their expertise available. Each with its own history, experience and professional background, they have joined forces to promote and enhance their rich cultural offer through wide-ranging initiatives, thereby creating a dynamic and virtuous network for the territory.
With the exhibition "ABOUT SCULPTURE: from the material to the immaterial. Art between the 20th and 21st century" the city's galleries are presented to the public, for the first time together, with the intention of presenting their work. The event is an important opportunity to introduce people to the world of galleries, helping disseminate the idea that galleries are not just a commercial activity, but that they are real cultural spaces curated by passionate experts: containers of art animated by the works of artists, by the professionals who work there and, nonetheless, by the people who visit them.
The first exhibition promoted by GAL is dedicated to sculpture. The galleries have converged in this debut exhibition to present to the public a purely cultural review, in which the works selected by each participant become the pieces of a mosaic that make up the history of the development of plastic art in the last century.
Through a dozen or so sections, the exhibition presents itself as an itinerary on the technical, stylistic and conceptual evolution of sculptural language, exploring the processes, materials and unprecedented relationships with space implemented between the 20th and 21st centuries. In fact, the history of contemporary sculpture follows an articulated itinerary, also marked by radical ruptures that have launched new directions of research: transformations that have characterised the extraordinary and vital development of plastic art in its most eclectic creative potential.
If for many centuries sculpture had a precise and restricted identity, as industry and technology progressed, the way in which it was conceived and realised changed, sparking off an era open to the maximum freedom of boundaries and the legitimisation of new practices, the founding elements of contemporary work. Amidst unexplored languages and modes of expression that take up and update traditional practices, the exhibition at the Asilo Ciani brings together some of the most relevant sculptural artists of the last century, who have interpreted matter in a thousand facets, pushing the boundaries of its very presence.
