Milan, artist Salvatore Scarpitta stars in an exhibition at A arte Invernizzi

Milan ’s A arte Invernizzi gallery is holding an exhibition dedicated to Salvatore Scarpitta (New York, 1919 - 2007), titled simply Salvatore Scarpitta, until February 17, 2022. The exhibition, conceived by German artist Günter Umberg in collaboration with Luigi Sansone, curator of the Catalogue raisonné of Salvatore Scarpitta, investigates the relationship established between the thirty works on display, which show Scarpitta’s creative making from his beginnings until 1992, and between them and the viewer, offering a never-before-seen view of the artist’s work.

The first room on the upper floor of the gallery exhibits works that mark Salvatore Scarpitta’s transition from a material-expressionist painting to a new figuration, which is first embodied in extroflexed canvases, as in the two Untitled (1957), and then in bandages and bandages, as in Untitled (1958). The works made at the end of the 1950s, examples of which can also be seen in the gallery’s offices, mark a fundamental moment in the artist’s research since in them the idea of an “abstract-real” production is activated, which departs from the mimetic process and becomes functional to the logic of building, of moving in a territory.

The dialogue between the works exhibited on the second floor is ideally summarized in that between thebronze Self-Portrait (1941), At Leo’s N.Y. C. (N.Y. Exhibition Announcement) (1965) and Face Stalker (1992). The wooden works exhibited in the second room on the upper floor stand in direct correlation with the bronze multiples on the wall at the entrance to the gallery and ideally concatenate the path of the two exhibition floors, in a game of cross-references made up of analogies and dissonances.

On the lower floor Gunner’s Mate (1961), the only one among the coeval works based on the modular repetition of crosses not to have been dismembered by the artist, takes the gesture of the works based on the blindfolded X in relief, such as X Core (1959) and Panciera (1959), to the extreme. The dialogue between these works and those made later such as Red Friar (Rebel Ski) (1989-1990) lets emerge the constant will, which emerges in the various types of works, however dissimilar from each other, to concretize in the work the vital continuum of the artist, his thought and language.

The presence of this work along with works such as Sal Is Racer (1985), a sequence of stills taken from one of the videos in which Scarpitta appears as a pilot, Mr. Hyde (Dr. Jekyll) (1989) and Peat Bog Sled (1992), sleds assembled by joining different materials with bandages and evoking the idea of travel,understood as a departure toward a destination that goes beyond the limit of objective reality, shows how the artist loads each physical element with symbolic value. The work, which is generated from a total experience lived in the first person, becomes part of a strictly individual narrative, in which it becomes a meeting point between art and life.

In 1993, Scarpitta himself stated in an interview, “One hopes that those who see, see beyond the objective fact before their eyes, and transcend it. [...] The elsewhere lies in the history common to all, through the passages we all encounter sooner or later: birth, death, violence, finding ourselves part of nature.”

On the occasion of the exhibition, a bilingual catalog will be published with an essay by Luigi Sansone and one by Davide Mogetta investigating the exhibition path conceived by Günter Umberg on the work of Salvatore Scarpitta, accompanied by iconographic documentation of the works on display.

For all information, you can visit the official website of the A arte Invernizzi gallery.

Pictured: Salvatore Scarpitta, Toga (1958; canvas and mixed media on panel, 24x35 cm). Photo by Bruno Bani, Milan

Milan, artist Salvatore Scarpitta stars in an exhibition at A arte Invernizzi

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