EXI[S]T. Sublimating functionality.
Stefania Beretta / Pier Giorgio De Pinto / Parapluie / Nina Staehli
15 January - 8 April 2023
In parallel with CABINET: WORKS FROM STORAGE, the MACT/CACT presents four artists who also work in the local area of Ticino.
EXI[S]T. SUBLIMATING FUNCTIONALITY is a counterbalance, tracing the line of demarcation that separated the tradition – mainly of painting – of the era from the new attitudes that were taking shape in society as a whole, from the influence of Duchamp onwards. For artists, coming to terms with the subject and analysing themselves as actors in the framework of the social context became increasingly significant and prioritised, such that the four pieces proposed in this exhibition already come from the penultimate generation that perceived the inspiration and the element of their work as previously solid certainties came tumbling down. An attempt to redo everything with a degree of conviction, over and above ideologies and avant-gardes, seems to have been one of the driving forces of post-contemporary art: in vain are also our attempts at spasmodic research to redefine collective stylistic traits within a given context of artistic production.
If on the one hand, in the difficult and risky passage to an uncertain political society, republican logic appears to have lost the splendour that was previously capable of objectively reflecting social justice and injustice, for example, on the other, art has set out gradually to recuperate its dimension as a driver of free thinking, uninhibited by market logic, despite money being still and above all fundamental in the field of artistic or philosophical disciplines.
In our exhausting slide towards a society of control, of corruption and of corruptibility, what is the point and what is the usefulness of art and of culture in general? Is art today still capable of incarnating a collective political and social function? Is there such a thing as a community that is capable of coexisting, coagulating and sustaining itself?
Mario Casanova
Bellinzona, 18 December 2022.
Stefania Beretta (1957), Trilogy #9, 2015. Fine art print, 90 x 90 cm. ©stefaniaberetta.
Where
MACT/CACT
Museo e Centro d’Arte Contemporanea Ticino
Via Tamaro 3, Bellinzona.
Opening hours
Friday, Saturday, Sunday
2 p.m. – 6 p.m.
Entry
CHF 6.00