The initiative, promoted by the Polo Regionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea of Palermo and by the Regional Department of Cultural Heritage and Sicilian Identity, not only has the value of recognition of the work of one of the most significant artists who emerged in the Sixties, but also to position him in that fertile generation of protagonists of Sicilian visual culture which together with Simeti includes, among others, Carla Accardi, Antonio Sanfilippo, Pietro Consagra, Emilio Isgrò and Renato Guttuso.
"With the Turi Simeti exhibition - declares Carlo Vermiglio, Councilor for Cultural Heritage and Sicilian Identity - the Regional Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Palazzo Riso continues the process of enhancing the most significant Sicilian artists on the national and international scene offering the public the opportunity to reflect on the role that Sicily has played when the protagonists of the creative scene have been able to look beyond their borders and deal with the most innovative experiences of contemporary artistic research without losing their original and distinctive character".
“The Polo Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art – says Valeria Li Vigni director of Riso – confirms its program of major events dedicated to Sicilian artists, who have obtained international recognition. The Museum celebrates, with this exhibition, the due recognition of the great work done by Turi Simeti, sharing it with the citizens of the entire region. Simeti, a Sicilian born in Alcamo, began his artistic career as a self-taught, strongly fueled by frequenting Roman circles where he met great artists and critics of international renown, which influenced his training and full-fledged recognition in the history of art. His ovals and the relationship between form and space, the balance between form and color and above all Sicily, the inspiring muse where he returns to work en plein air, are the basis of his constantly evolving production ”.
“With Turi Simeti – continues the director – the tradition of a new artistic language is confirmed, which in the 50s started right from Sicily, and today collected by the Riso museum which reaffirms the role of Museum/laboratory of Contemporary Art, a place where culture is created, research and the future of the younger generations is built”.
The choice of the curator has privileged for the Palermo appointment a path that provides for the exhibition of over twenty large-scale recent works, created between 2015 and 2016, characterized by the common denominator of the vastness of the surfaces, to which ten other paintings will be added smaller in size, which will occupy the noble floor of Palazzo Belmonte.
As Bruno Corà underlines, in his text in the catalog (Skira), "The coherence of the linguistic and formal path and the constancy in the sensitization of the surface elaborated by Simeti through the oval are thus revealed, together with a predilection for monovalent colour, the salient and inexhaustible aspects of his work. In it, the skilful administration of light and shadow plays a further role in the various modulations of the canvases. In each painting, in this way, even the size of the supports contributes to distinguishing the plastic and morphological quality of the images that Simeti is able to arouse. In the spatiality that he achieves, the intervals of surfaces devoid of awareness, the apparent "voids", the unheard-of silences, as in the constellations suspended in the cosmos, take on incisive values and contribute to the image of the work with the same weight assigned and achieved by the ovals, which, like planets, compose the reciprocal dynamics of attraction and spatial gravitation".
At the end of the exhibition, the catalog raisonné of Turi Simeti's work will be presented, in two volumes, published by Skira, created by the Simeti Archive, edited by Antonio Addamiano and Federico Sardella.
Turi Simeti (Alcamo, 1929; lives and works in Milan) moved to Rome in 1958, where he made his first contacts with the art world; he will then have the opportunity to stay in London, Paris, Basel and New York, thus coming into contact with the artistic avant-garde of the time and moving in harmony with the rampant desire to reset tradition and pre-established codes. Within this rigorous reductionist aspiration, his language acquires a definite recognition through the use of monochrome and relief as the only compositional procedures. Thus appears the figure of the ellipse, destined to become the artist's iconic code and the form that emblematically expresses the sentiment around which, still today, his creative process develops and unfolds.
Turi Simeti's work is represented by Dep Art, Milan; Almine Rech Gallery, Brussels, London and New York; Tornabuoni Art, Paris; Volker Diehl, Berlin; The Mayor Gallery, London.
His works are held in important public and private collections around the world, including the Prada Foundation, the Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art of Turin, Museion - Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Bolzano, the Museo del Novecento of Milan, Ludovico Corrao Civic Museum of Contemporary Art, Gibellina, Museu de Arte Moderna di Rio de Janeiro, Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg, Denmark, Schaufler Foundation, Sindelfingen, Germany, Museum Voorlinden, Wassenar, The Netherlands.
