The aim of the exhibition is to explore Gnoli's practice and interpret his activity as a unitary discourse free from labels, documenting connections with the international cultural scene of his time and suggesting resonances with contemporary visual research.
The exhibition, conceived by German Celant, brings together more than 100 works created by the artist since 1949 al 1969 accompanied by numerous drawings. A chronological and documentary section with historical materials, photographs and other testimonies helps to reconstruct the biographical and artistic path of Domenico Gnoli (Rome, 1933 - New York, 1970), more than fifty years after his death.
The project sees the collaboration with the artist's archives in Rome and Mallorca, guardians of the personal and professional history of the same. The career of Gnoli, nephew of Domenico and son of Umberto Gnoli, both critics and art historians, begins under the sign of duplicity: on the one hand his work as a set designer, costume designer and illustrator, on the other the pictorial work . In 1955 his sets for the pastoral comedy As You Like It by William Shakespeare presented at the Old Vic in London received great acclaim and made him known also in the United States. Since 1959 he has lived between Rome, New York, where he exhibited in various galleries and worked as an illustrator for magazines and publications, Paris and London before settling in 1963 in Deià on the island of Majorca.
In 1964, Gnoli made a linguistic leap which led him to bring out his own analytical painting alongside the results obtained as a set designer and illustrator. In a letter from the following year, the artist himself recounts this development: “I've always worked [as a painter] like now, but you didn't see it, because it was the moment of abstraction. Only now, thanks to Pop Art, my painting has become understandable. I always use given and simple elements, I don't want to add or subtract anything. I have never even had the desire to distort: I isolate and represent. My themes derive from current events, from family situations in everyday life; since I never actively intervene against the object, I can feel the magic of its presence”.
Since then he has crossed the paths of minimalism, hyperrealism and Pop Art. His precise and material painting that enhances the surfaces, colors and materials of organic and inanimate elements is also characterized by a rigorous photographic approach. The installation designed by the 2×4 studio in New York for the two floors of the Podium evokes the
layout and characteristics of twentieth-century museum environments by tracing linear perspectives that divide the exhibition space into a sequence of monographic nuclei. The artist's works are in fact grouped into thematic series, thanks to which it is possible to recognize how each work has generated other works by him in a coherent expressive direction.
A scientific publication, published by Fondazione Prada and graphically designed by Irma Boom, completes the exhibition. Through a new essay written for the exhibition by Salvatore Settis and two parallel illustrated chronologies that insert Gnoli in the historical and artistic time in which he operates, the volume reconstructs the artist's career and biography.
