The Cini Foundation announces an anthological exhibition dedicated to Isgrò. And on the walls the erased Moby Dick.


From Sept. 14 to Nov. 24, 2019, the Cini Foundation in Venice presents an extensive anthological exhibition dedicated to Emilio Isgrò, from the 1960s to the present.

The Giorgio Cini Foundation announces a rich anthology dedicated to Emilio Isgrò: the exhibition, curated by Germano Celant in collaboration with the artist and theEmilio Isgrò Archive, will be open to the public from September 14 to November 24, 2019.

The anthological exhibition will trace the art of the painter and poet, as well as novelist, playwright and director, from the 1960s to the present day: from his early erasures to his visual poems on canvases to his articulate erased texts in the historical volumes of L’Enciclopedia Treccani and the Ottoman Codices.

Isgrò’s works will be exhibited in the Halls of the Foundation’s Napoleonic Wing, the walls of which will serve as paper supports conveying a new erasure operation performed on literary material. For this purpose, Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick was chosen as the text. "The theme I address for this exhibition at the Cini Foundation in Venice, the city where the first erasures were born in 1964, can only be that of language. That is why it seemed necessary to me to turn to the biblical tradition filtered through Moby Dick, Melville’s wonderful novel. It will be Melville’s erased work that will therefore contain all the others, and those who enter the exhibition will allow themselves to be accompanied into the belly of the whale, that is, the belly of media language that covers its own real and despairing silence with noise," said the artist himself.

Other works in the exhibition from important public and private collections, national and international, include Il Cristo cancellatore (1968), an installation composed of 38 erased volumes, from the Centre Pompidou in Paris; Carta geografica (1970) from the Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto; Storico, an erased book from 1972, from the Galleria Nazionale d’Modern Art in Rome; the monumental erased map Weltanschauung (2007) from the Centro d’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato; Poesia Volkswagen (1964) from the Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione in Parma; La corsa di Alma (1969) from the Museo Civico Giovanni Fattori in Livorno; and the six-volume erased Corpus Iustinianeum from 2018.

For info: www.cini.it

Image: Emilio Isgrò, Ottoman Codex of Solitude (2010; acrylic on book in wood box and plexiglass, 57.5 x 82.5 x 13 cm)

The Cini Foundation announces an anthological exhibition dedicated to Isgrò. And on the walls the erased Moby Dick.
The Cini Foundation announces an anthological exhibition dedicated to Isgrò. And on the walls the erased Moby Dick.


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