{"id":5784,"date":"2021-03-25T11:46:51","date_gmt":"2021-03-25T09:46:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/francescosomaini.org\/mostre\/somaini-crispolti\/"},"modified":"2021-06-22T10:39:51","modified_gmt":"2021-06-22T08:39:51","slug":"somaini-crispolti","status":"publish","type":"exhibition","link":"https:\/\/www.francescosomaini.org\/en\/mostre\/somaini-crispolti\/","title":{"rendered":"Francesco Somaini and Enrico Crispolti"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Digital Exhibition<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

This digital exhibition, created in collaboration with the Enrico Crispolti Archive in Rome, could be visited on the Francesco Somaini Foundation website. It documents the salient stages of the collaboration and friendship established between the sculptor and the critic from 1956 to 2005 (year of death of the artist), through some personal photos, works\u2019 images preserved in the Crispolti collection, book covers and catalogs, as well as some letters taken from their monumental correspondence. The young critic was struck by the sculptor’s work at the Venice Biennale in 1956, where he was present with two large works in ferric conglomerate placed at the entrance to the Italian Pavilion. After that, he visited Somaini’s atelier in Lomazzo for the first time and this meeting will transform over time into a long friendship and collaboration, punctuated by numerous exhibition and editorial opportunities. As a matter of fact, the critic will follow the artist in the various stages of the evolution of his creative activity, starting with the presentation of the concretist phase\u2019s works in the personal exhibition at the La Salita Gallery (Rome, 1957), during the informal season (Odyssia Gallery, Rome, 1959) and the subsequent proposal of a new plastic research, promptly reported in the Omaggio a Somaini<\/em> in the context of Alternative Attuali 3 <\/em>in L’Aquila in 1968. This research will lead the artist to make a profound reflection on the relationship between sculpture, architecture and urban context, which resulted in Urgenza nella citt\u00e0<\/em>, co-written with Enrico Crispolti in 1972; as an important moment of their collaboration it will lead the critic to orient his own interests in the field of sculpture as social participation (Operation 24 sheets and Volterra ’73, https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ToJkny3Taug), during the following year, and the artist to the proposal of new types of environmental works, with the conception of the Carnificazioni di un’architettura<\/em>, of the following Antropoammoniti<\/em>, carved matrices that generate a trace, and of the related photomontages of utopian contextualization. It is no coincidence that Crispolti (as commissioner and then as curator of the Italian Pavilion) presented these Somaini’s works at the 1976 and 1978 Venice Biennials. The same topic will be addressed later in various exhibitions up to the exhibition at the Triennale Palace in Milan in 2017 (Francesco Somaini. Uno scultore per la citt\u00e0. New York 1967-1976<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The critic will accompany Somaini’s activity until the last season, taking care of the Somaini monograph Somaini. Le grandi opere. Realizzazioni, progetti, utopie <\/em>(1997) and the IX Biennale Internazionale di Scultura \u201cCitt\u00e0 di Carrara\u201d. Scultura, architettura, citt\u00e0<\/em> (1998).
Crispolti is also the curator with Luisa Somaini of the Catalog Raisonn\u00e9 of the sculpture <\/em>forthcoming by Skira.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Personal photos<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Enrico Crispolti <\/strong>(Rome, 1933-2018), a \u201cmilitant\u201d critic, art historian and university professor. He met Francesco Somaini in 1956; from that moment on he began assiduously following his work in all its phases, from his periods of concrete to informal art and then his study of the relationship between sculpture, architecture and urban settings. He was also one of the most prestigious experts on Futurism, Informal Art, Pop Art and artists of many trends, and starting in the second half of the 1950s he founded one of the vastest private archives in Italy as a centre of documentation of contemporary art (https:\/\/www.archiviocrispolti.it<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n