MAR Museo d’Arte della città di Ravenna

curated by Elettra Stamboulis

 The Tradition of Novelty | Giulio Guberti Art Prize

Winners: Elisa Strinna - Giuseppe De Mattia

 June 23rd - July 15th 2018

MAR Via di Roma, 13, 48121 Ravenna RA (Italy)

Giulio Guberti was a doctor and art critic from Ravenna who curated a major season of exhibitions at Ravenna Municipal Art Gallery (Pinacoteca Comunale di Ravenna) from 1977 to 1981, involving critics of national level, and local intellectuals, some still really young at that time. It was a project impacting on Ravenna cultural fabric in the long run: on the one hand it fostered the growth of local artistic and cultural professionals, on the other it helped the development of the then Pinacoteca Comunale. The Tradition of Novelty (“La Tradizione del Nuovo”) was the catalogue published along the fithteen exhibitions curated by Guberti, bearing still today witness of that experience’s relevance.

This first edition of the Prize looks into the same topic of June 1979’s edition, titled “Section d’Or or Restauration”, curated by Giulio Guberti himself together with and Flavio Caroli. The Section d’Or originally was a collective of early ‘900, involving for about two years an heterogeneous group of artists (from Duchamp to Picabia, from Apollinaire to Kupka), who wanted to detach from Montmartre cubism and try an orphic interpretation of line and shape.

Curators of 1979 in Ravenna recalled that experience in order to invite artists to reflect on their own work and take stock of the situation about returns, recalls, reminiscences: an investigation asking to the involved artists for a statement about “return to order”, then called “reflux”, starting from visual art but without any given correlation with politics, sociology and history. Adami, Carmi, Isgrò, Pozzati, Tadini and many other answered to that call. Today we ask: after almost 40 years are we still likely to be in Restauration times?

Elisa Strinna (Padova, 1982) studied at Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna and then at Università Iuav di Venezia. She can boast five solo exhibition (the most recent at MART in Rovereto) and many participation in collective exhibitions around Italy, Europe, America and Asia, as well as residencies and awards, among which The Fondazione Cerere Prize, Shanghai Prize and the residency Seoul Art Space_GEUMCHEON in Corea. She is currently living and working in Maastricht, Netherlands. In her works Strinna investigates the relationship among nature and culture, redrawing the line between them. Her artistic research has the same quality of philosophical investigation, physical experimentation and engineering invention.

Giuseppe De Mattia (Bari, 1980) studied at DAMS Cinema di Bologna, he is currently living and working in Bologna, where he also holds a teaching position at Spazio Labò Photography. He is co-founder of the audio-visual duo ‘Fake Samoa’ alongside Nico Pasquini and is an active member of the collective ‘Casa a Mare’ alongside Luca Coclite and Claudio Musso. He publishes artist’s multiples with Libri Tasso publishing project from 2015. He publishes with Danilo Montanari Editore, Corraini Edizioni e Skinnerboox. He works with Matéria Gallery (Roma), Nowhere Gallery (Milano) e Corraini Arte Contemporanea (Mantova). De Mattia work starts from photography and moves toward different medias and experimentations: from video, to audio, drawing and performance. He strives to salvage and take care of what has been created by the passing of time in the form of scraps and waste.