VENICE.- The Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents Marina Apollonio: Beyond the Circle, the most comprehensive museum retrospective in Italy dedicated to Marina Apollonio, a leading figure in the international Optical and Kinetic avant-garde whose work was championed by Peggy Guggenheim.
Organized by independent art historian and curator Marianna Gelussi, the exhibition features about one hundred works on loan from the artist’s collection, as well as from national and international museums, including the Neue Gallery in Graz; the Fondation Villa Datris in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, France; the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome; MART in Rovereto, Italy; the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin; the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen and the Museum Ritter in Waldenbuch, Germany; and the Museum Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich.
Marina Apollonio: Beyond the Circle is a deserved tribute to the Triestine artist, tracing her career from 1963 to the present. The show highlights her rigorous visual investigations, encompassing painting, sculpture, drawing, as well as static, moving, and environmental works, black-and-white or chromatic paintings, and experimentations in a variety of media and techniques. The fact that this homage is presented in the galleries of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni is particularly fitting, not only because Venice is Apollonio’s adoptive city, where she lived as a girl and took her first steps as an artist, but also because it highlights the role of visionary collector Peggy Guggenheim in her career. Indeed, in 1968, after having visited the artist’s solo exhibition at the Galleria Paolo Barozzi in Venice, Guggenheim commissioned Rilievo n. 505 (ca. 1968), currently part of the museum’s collection, which testifies to her support of young Italian avant-garde artists. The show follows other exhibitions organized by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection devoted to Italian postwar artists supported by the U.S. patron, including Edmondo Bacci and his recent retrospective, and Tancredi Parmeggiani.
The daughter of Umbro Apollonio, art critic, author, and director of the Venice Biennale’s Archivio Storico from 1949 to 1972, Marina moved to Venice in 1948, at the age of eight, where she grew up surrounded by artists and intellectuals. Infected by the “art virus,” as she likes to remember it, she began her investigations around visual perception in 1962, drawn to the objective language of geometry, particularly the circle, in sync with the artistic vision of the new Arte programmata (Programmed art) movement. In 1966, on the occasion of her first solo show at the Centro Arte Viva Feltrinelli in Trieste, she wrote: “my artistic investigations seek to be explorations of phenomenological possibilities related to forms and basic structures. Basic form inherently contains total abstraction in that it is made up of a mathematical program. Hence, action takes place with absolute precision, in a direct relationship between intuition, on an optic level, and verification, within a mathematical system. Having selected a primary form, such as a circle, I study its structural possibilities as a means of activating it, aiming for the best results with the maximum economy.”
Apollonio started out on her own rigorous path alone, without subscribing to any group and against her father’s wishes. In 1964 she met Getulio Alviani, who encouraged her to exhibit her work. In 1965 she was awarded the Chiodo d’Oro prize in Palermo and participated in the third edition of Nova Tendencija in Zagreb, a biennial exhibition “with no statute,” based on “elective affinities” and a feeling of kinship, where she met Dadamaino, who became a close friend. This was followed by travels throughout Europe and solo shows and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad, alongside the international constellation of Optical and Kinetic artists. Apollonio was particularly close to the Gruppo N in Padua (Alberto Biasi, Ennio Chiggio, Toni Costa, Edoardo Landi, Manfredo Massironi), and frequented the Gruppo T in Milan (Giovanni Anceschi, Davide Boriani, Gianni Colombo, Gabriele Devecchi, Grazia Varisco), friends Alviani and Dadamaino, artists close to Azimut/h, such as Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni, the Zero group from Düsseldorf, such as Nanda Vigo, and well-established artists Enzo Mari and Bruno Munari. Apollonio shared their commitment and utopian vision, their wish to subvert the status quo, to revolutionize art and, through art, to revolutionize reality. They sought to move beyond Art Informel, transforming the role of the artist, and elaborating an objective and universal artistic idiom that embraced the present and the continuous becoming of reality, as a means of democratizing art.
From the mid-1970s, while continuing to regularly exhibit her work and experiment with new media such as textiles, the profound historical and societal changes that led to the decline of Optical and Kinetic art impacted Apollonio’s practice. In the early 2000s her career gained new momentum thanks to a renewed interest in international Kinetic art which led to numerous exhibitions dedicated to the movement especially internationally. In 2007, art historian and the current director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Max Hollein, included her work in the major exhibition Op Art, held at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, In 2022, on the occasion of the 59th Venice Art Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, curator Cecilia Alemani showed her work in the Central Pavillion at the Giardini, in the section Technologies of Enchantment, alongside Dadamaino, Lucia Di Luciano, Laura Grisi, Grazia Varisco, and Nanda Vigo.
The exhibition Marina Apollonio: Beyond the Circle introduces visitors to the artist’s multiple lines of enquiry, which take shape through a rigorous method and continual experimental investigations around and beyond the circle. Structures, lines, multiple techniques, and diverse media carry form beyond the limits of its surface and frame, introducing movement to space and perception and opening passages to new dimensions. The vitality of Apollonio’s works is expressed through elegant and perfectly programmed execution: geometry, far from being a sterile structure, comes to life, mirroring the universe and its mathematical order. The circle returns obsessively in infinite variations. Through its repetitions it becomes charged with symbolic value, revealing a desire for expansion, fusion, and totality. Visitors are able to admire the iconic Dimaniche circolari series, started in 1963 and consisting of static and mobile objects that explore structure and the possibility of activating the circle, and the intense vitality of the Rilievi, some of the artist’s earliest works. Created in the 1960s and 1970s, these are metallic structures that capture and refract the surrounding environment. The exhibition also includes sculptures based on the circle and its multiplication, characterized by the reflective property of metal; the elegant Gradazioni, paintings of concentric circles created from the second half of the 1960s; the slender Rilievi a diffusione cromatica, white monochrome relief-paintings from the early 1970s, in which circles carved into a plastic support and painted in the grooves are activated by the viewer's movement; and the Espansioni, small-scale paintings from the same period which feature chromatic explosions of concentric colored lines. Apollonio’s oeuvre is also explored through her drawings, her first investigations on paper, and previously unpublished archival material, shedding light on lesser-known aspects of her production and revealing the determined coherence and the simple harmony and energy of her poetics. The exhibition also features two new site-specific projects which highlight the contemporary relevance of Apollonio’s investigations: the environment Entrare nell’opera, created by the artist especially for the exhibition, and the equally new musical installation Endings, the result of a recent collaboration with composer Guglielmo Bottin, developed out of the spiral in Fusione circolare of 2016.
Marina Apollonio: Beyond the Circle interacts with Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, where a gallery is dedicated to works by the leading figures of Optical and Kinetic art collected and exhibited by Peggy Guggenheim during the 1960s, including Alberto Biasi, Martha Boto, Franco Costalonga, Heinz Mack, Manfredo Massironi, Francisco Sobrino, Victor Vasarely and, of course, Apollonio, as an homage to these avant-garde movements.
The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue, edited by Marsilio Arte, featuring essays by curator Marianna Gelussi, art historian Arnaud Pierre, Max Hollein, and an interview with Cecilia Alemani.
