From 30 June to 26 September 2013, the Scaliger Castle of Sirmione (BS) will host the exhibition of 30 works by Franca Ghitti (1932-2012), entitled The ways of water. The exhibition curated by Renato Gentile, organized by the Superintendency for architectural and landscape assets of Brescia Cremona and Mantua, in collaboration with the Franca Ghitti Archive, will present the large-scale sculptures, created in the last thirty years of the artist's life bresciana.
Since the XNUMXs, Franca Ghitti, a design and conceptual artist, has developed an idea of ecological sculpture that sees water as the protagonist, not as an element in itself, but in relation to the territory.
The Sirmione review explores this line of expression through a series of works such as the imposing Burnt Wood, in wood, or the large iron sculptures and installations such as Albero, Cascata, Acqua, Pioggia, Vele, or Acqua su i Navigli , The Water Sign, Waves.
Franca Ghitti thinks of water as a natural agent of an eternal and anonymous action that intervenes on things in ways similar to those of sculpture; water also represents the energy that the blacksmith's hands regulate, measure and modify in the millennial processes of working iron, or those of wood in sawmills, or mills and that the artist remedies according to his research and the his concept of “sculpture as an absolute language”. Water is an element without color, but it acquires it in relation to the light that Franca Gritti gives it ("a liquid and volatile matter, whose weight is lightness" he wrote in her notes). However, water, understood as a means of communication, or a vital element for nature and man, is never directly represented, but only evoked in his work as action, movement, sense of flow, writing on the territory through the channels irrigate, repeated and infinite rhythm.
In 2014, a complete monograph of his work will be published (Umberto Allemandi editore), edited by Elena Pontiggia, while the catalog raisonné of his works is being prepared, in collaboration with Marco Meneguzzo.
Franca Ghitti
He was born in Erbanno in Val Camonica in 1932. He studied at the Brera Academy in Milan, attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, and the engraving course in Salzburg directed by Oskar Kokoschka. In the 1969s he created his first wooden sculptures (Vicinie, Rogazioni, Litanie) intending to define an image of space that also has a dimension of time and history ever since. He recovers worn wood, sawmill leftovers, nails, to evoke the presence of a culture interwoven with constant and repeated elements: it is already a work of anthropological mapping. From 1971 to 1979 he lived and worked in Kenya, where he created, on behalf of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the large cement-bound windows of the Church of the Italians in Nairobi. Travels and contacts with many tribal cultures clarify the value of formal codes as sediments, "other alphabets" left by communities and social structures. She returned to Italy, she works wood and iron, revisiting now marginalized languages, linked to the old traditions of work in the woods and in the forges. In 1988 you created Ghitti-Gates, a sculpture-gate for the Agricultural Museum of the Brunnenburg Castle in Alto Adige. His exhibitions are presented in important venues in Mantua, Turin, Milan, Heidelberg, up to the great anthology of Palazzo Braschi in Rome in 1995. Since the seventies the sculpture of Franca Ghitti, which took the moves of the founding structures of the rustic architecture (knotted ropes, notches on the bark, alignments and joints of wood and stones), dialogues directly, in large installations, with modular techniques and contemporary architecture. Among the various public interventions, the idea of a sculpture that creates places of reflection and collective identification is expressed in a large installation in relation to the urban space for the square of Nadro in Val Camonica and in large iron installations for various locations, in Italy and abroad, by Banca Credito Italiano. In 1997 an anthology of her was hosted in the halls of Palazzo Martinengo and in the former Church of San Desiderio in Brescia. In XNUMX you created significant public interventions, such as The sign of water, a large cascading iron structure in Lake Iseo (Brescia); The Archive of Materials, an environmental intervention with glass blocks, stone, iron and wood in the new residential building district of San Polo in Brescia; The cubic map for the headquarters of the Builders of Brescia. Thus she renews the research on the Maps, recovering scrap iron.
In 1998 he finished the stained glass windows for a new church in Bergamo and as Visiting Professor at the Akademie of the Bildenden Künste in Vienna he created five installations entitled Other Alphabets, entrusting to different materials (earth, lime, iron mesh, ropes) a rethinking of some junctions of his set sculptures, real Maps. He continues the dialogue with architects and designers who find in his work moments of meeting and discussion for a lively reflection on space as a "place of belonging". In 2000 he exhibited Other Alphabets at the OK Harris Gallery in New York; the Gates of Europe in September in Munich (Pasinger Fabrik) and in November in Bilbao (Fundacion Bilbao Bizkaia Kutxa).
In 2001 he created a large iron sculpture for the Rocca di San Giorgio in Orzinuovi (Brescia) where he set up the exhibition Cancelli d'Europa with seven large iron installations. In 2003 for Pitti Immagine Uomo, at the Fortezza da Basso in Florence, he created the Tree-sail and the Spiral, a large installation in iron. Also in 2003, the anthology Altri Alfabeti: sculptures and installations in Palazzo Besta di Teglio (Sondrio). In November-December of the same year he presented Maps-Mapping, sculptures and installations at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York. Here the theme of maps, fundamental in his career, is rethought in a broader perspective and through a new search for materials. In 2008, the Pages – Nails exhibition at the OK Harris Works of Art in New York featured Pagine chiodate, unpublished works of graphics and sculpture made with paper, cardboard and nails. In September 2008, at the invitation of BresciaMusei, he inaugurated the exhibition The city and its imprint at the Castle of Brescia. In May and June 2009 he presented the Project for the Navigli area. Sculpture in the city – Acqua sul Naviglio, Museo della Permanente, Milan. This is followed by the new exhibition La ville et son empreinte – Sculptures et installations in the halls of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris La Villette during the month of October. Between March and April 2010 he finished the Doors of Silence and the furnishings for the chapel of the New Hospital of Como. In recent years, Franca Ghitti's challenge has become that of facing her time, technologies and serial languages, restoring to them a rhythm of existential elements, in stratified sequences of molds and wood and iron processing scraps. Her installations transform a geometric space into a historical space, so that the "place of sculpture" offers itself as a deposit and archive of real ideological, social and work structures.
Personalities from culture and literature have dealt with his work, including Vanni Scheiwiller, Vittorio Sereni, Roberto Sanesi, Italo Calvino, Maria Corti, Mary de Rachewiltz, John Freccero, Franco Loi, as well as art historians and critics including : Giulio Carlo Argan, Carlo Belli, Carlo Bertelli, Rossana Bossaglia, Enrico Crispolti, Cecilia De Carli, Elda Fezzi, Ivan Karp, Fausto Lorenzi, Giuseppe Marchiori, Margaret Morton, William Klein, Bruno Passamani, Elena Pontiggia, Walter Schoenenberger. She died in 2012.
Sirmione (BS), Scaliger Castle
30 June – 26 September 2013
Times: from Tuesday to Sunday, from 9 to 19
