The evolution of the mark

Published: 2009 - April/May, Cultural and Artistic Paths

March 21 - May 17 2009 the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents “Themes and Variations: From the Mark to Zero”, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero. This exhibition draws upon the museum’s permanent collections from the early 20th century to the post World War II period and charts the progress of the pictorial mark chronologically and thematically: from typography to collage, from letters to numbers, to the iteration of gesture, of signs, eventually sublimating into monochrome, beyond which the only possible condition is the void.
Works of Cubism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism: within the radical experimentation of this explosive period, letters, numbers and the printed word participate as full players in the creative process—plucked from the real world, manipulated and then rendered with their original linguistic and communicative dimensions still intact. From the works by Carlo Carrà, Kurt Shifters, and Joseph Cornell, to the new grammars of a similar language in the 50s by Mimmo Rotella and Daniel Spoerri, the printed word structures and defines images but with a resonance that convulses the visual syntax. On the one hand language dialogues with matière and image, as in Georges Braque’s multi-media works and the collages of Juan Gris; on the other, the grid laid down by Piet Mondrian’s repetitive marks creates the new space of Georges Vantongerloo’s Neoplasticism, which in turn nourishes the minimal precision of John McCracken. Basic units of language evocatively colonize the surfaces of works by Osvaldo Licini and Bonfanti to the point they become mute writing. Sometimes the act of painting transforms into a form of scripture, on canvas or any other support; at other times, artists investigate the foundations and responsiveness of different visual codes.
Writing is also geometry and color, rendered in the lyrical, intermittent and visionary spaces of Tancredi Parmeggiani, Mark Tobey, and Carla Accardi. Elsewhere script and writing merge in an abstract and symbolic punctuation, expressed in apostrophes and dots that may visually or physically violate the support itself, with holes and cuts, as in the canvases of Lucio Fontana and Dadamaino, and in the work of the most recent generation of artists, represented here by Riccardo De Marchi and Arcangelo Sassolino.
The obsessive repetition of a symbol or a sign leads ultimately to a condition of zero, a kind of ‘tabula rasa’ in which pure paint combines with a minimal and monochrome surface: the monochrome inscribes the infinite into the finite and is articulated in densely painted and plastic works with the concreteness and physicality that derive from their relation to surrounding space.
As a ‘variation’ of this theme, the exhibition includes a one-man show of painting, “Vigil” by British artist Jason Martin, who has been invited to interpret grade zero with a series of canvases specifically created for this exhibition. Jason Martin is among the most interesting painters of the generation of Young British Artists and he has been invited to present a sequence of monochromes, refined in texture and luminous in tone, poised between painting and sculpture. Visitors can enjoy free guided visits of the temporary exhibitions, daily at 3:30pm.