Open to the public from May 28 to 26 September 2021 at the Gallerie d'Italia – Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano, Intesa Sanpaolo museum in Naples, the exhibition Los Angeles (State of Mind), edited by Luca Beatrice. In an engaging itinerary of 36 works from Italian and international galleries and private collections and from the Luigi and Peppino Agrati – Intesa Sanpaolo collection, the exhibitionLos Angeles (State of Mind), created under the patronage of the Consulate General of the United States in Naples, is the story of a city through various generations of artists who have established themselves since the XNUMXs up to today.
Michele Coppola, Intesa Sanpaolo Executive Director of Art, Culture and Historical Heritage, he claims: “The Intesa Sanpaolo museum in Naples has returned to welcoming visitors and today enriches the exhibition proposal in the city with an original study of international contemporary art, alongside Caravaggio and the other masterpieces from our collections housed here. The Gallerie d'Italia are an emblematic place of the Bank's bond with Naples and of our commitment to contributing to the social and cultural growth of the city and the country. In this logic we are working on the forthcoming opening of a new and larger museum location in via Toledo, a strong sign of the desire to start over by focusing on art and culture as key development factors."
“The decision to dedicate this exhibition to the city of Los Angeles is further proof of the intense and historical cultural relationships that exist between the United States and the city of Naples. We are also happy to have offered our patronage at a particularly important time for the restart of all cultural events", He declares Mary Avery, Consul General of the United States in Naples.
If New York is the world, Los Angeles is certainly America, that America that captures our imagination never to leave it. A megalopolis in the desert, a universe in itself that speaks many languages and experiences many contradictions: a fertile mix of languages and peoples.
Art, in Los Angeles, describes a particular world, between experimentation and painting, extreme performances and contamination with alternative lowbrow cultures. The city has always produced complex art, serving as a magnet for creatives from other states. In recent years Los Angeles has been defined as the new mecca of contemporary art, finally from an international perspective and attentive to new cultural phenomena.
At the beginning, even in California, styles and languages overlap without a prevailing line or genre. To the latest abstract painting experiences with Sam francis here is the coexistence of Pop Art Ed Ruscha, different from the New York one, more critical and less addicted to the exaltation of the media and consumption, for a figuration that often overturns the stereotypes of West Coast culture, starting with the famous "Hollywood" sign. The Seventies, however, are also the decade of conceptual art, of Body Art and of happenings, in the figures of John Baldessari e Paul McCarthy, often extreme performers, by Ed Kienholz need Lynda benglis, among the leading exponents of militant feminism.
Raymond Pettibon, interpreter of American nightmares in his black drawings representing the negative heroes of the counterculture, Manuel Ocampo, who moved from the Philippines to Los Angeles and author of a Baroque painting that reflects on the mingling of the sacred and the profane, Jeffrey Vallance, whose investigation becomes social and anthropological, Jim Isermann, which overturns the canons of Minimalism through the mix with design and digital graphics, up to Eric White, representative of the new pictorial wave known as Pop Surrealism or Low Brow.
Emerged in the nineties, Doug Aitken which is expressed through video installations and photographs, the neo-minimalist Rita McBride and the abstractionist Ingrid Calame. Today's Los Angeles looks above all to Black Culture, a phenomenon that manifests itself in all its social urgency and constitutes the backbone of the critical renewal of American culture. The drawings of Umar Rashid and the intense painting of Henry Taylor bear witness to this epochal passage, for an ever-changing America.
As in the other exhibitions of the cycle dedicated to the metropolis (New York, London and Berlin), once again the relationship between Naples and international art is close. And Los Angeles is no exception. Galleries and collectors have not missed the appointment with the most complex area of America, perhaps finding cultural similarities and similarities there.
With the pioneering spirit that distinguishes the cultural operators of Naples, Lia Rumma represents gary hill, forerunner of video art, Alfonso Artiaco proposed the intense cinematic atmosphere painting of Glen Rubsamen and the sculpture-installations of Rita McBride. The work of Allan McCollum, from the Trisorio collection, comes directly from the archaeological sites of Pompeii. The work of J, who tragically passed away in February 2020, which includes a group of seventy-seven drawings inspired by the book Sacred guide of the city of Naples (1872), which the artist gave to his gallery owner Lucio Amelio in the eighties. The Italian branch of the London Thomas Dane Gallery offers a video of Lynda Benglis, the photographs of Catherine Opie and his alternative humanity of LGBTQ communities, the acid and symbolic painting of Lari Pittman.Lastly, the Fonti Gallery represents the conceptual painter Eric Wesley and the Neapolitan artist Piero Golia, who for over fifteen years has chosen to live in Los Angeles.
