Twenty-four museums of the Association of Italian Contemporary Art Museums (AMACI) and another 1000 realities throughout Italy for the fourteenth consecutive year open their spaces to the public free of charge and inaugurate the season of contemporary art next Saturday 13 October 2018.
Every year the review is entrusted to an artist who has the task of creating the guiding image of the event and this year the choice of the directors of the associated museums fell on Marcello Maloberti, a visual artist inspired by the most marginal and minimal urban realities with particular attention to the precariousness of life.
Medusa is the title of the image created by Maloberti for the Fourteenth Contemporary Day. The figure identifies a bare-chested African boy, but with his face covered by a motorcycle helmet decorated with shells, who looks straight into the visitor's eyes, forcing him to look back. The hardness of the gaze and the static nature of the pose are in marked contrast with the general sense of lightness of the work that the artist has given, revisiting the principles of classical iconography: the young man appears as a mythological figure, a divinity re-emerged from the depths of the sea, where he lived or where he was probably shipwrecked during a ship crossing. That of the protagonist is a lapidary gaze that asks for answers and which, ambiguously, as if referring to a contemporary Medusa, could transform the spectator into stone, fascinating or repelling him.
New for the 2018 edition of the review is the participation of the MAECI foreign network and in particular of the Italian Cultural Institutes abroad, as venues participating in the event, with the aim of promoting Italian creativity beyond national borders. Thanks to the collaboration launched during the last editions with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and thanks to the coordination put in place this year by the Directorate General for the Promotion of the Country System of the MAECI and by the Directorate General for Contemporary Art, Architecture and Suburbs For the week preceding the AMACI Day - from 8 to 13 October - Urbane of the MiBACT - also Embassies, Consulates and Italian Cultural Institutes abroad will be able to organize debates, conferences, exhibitions and activities to promote art in their own jurisdiction and contemporary Italian culture.
Also this year the event benefits from the support of the DGAAP - Directorate General for Contemporary Art and Architecture and Urban Peripheries and the patronage of the Representation in Italy of the European Commission, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, the Conference of Regions and Provinces autonomous, UPI - Union of Italian Provinces, ANCI - National Association of Italian Municipalities, ICOM Italy and the Lombardy Region.
For over ten years, Contemporary Art Day has been a continuous confirmation for contemporary art enthusiasts and the increasingly numerous onlookers who want to get closer to art, museums, foundations, galleries and artist's studios, take part to debates, guided tours and workshops, actively coming into contact with the art of the present.
