As happens in some international institutions, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea will “host” an Italian artist for one year, organizing a series of events and dedicating a room to exhibit a significant selection of their works.
The initiative, promoted and coordinated by GNAM Director Renata Cristina Mazzantini, in collaboration with the Emilio Isgrò Archive and thanks to the contribution of Intesa Sanpaolo and Techbau as main sponsors, with the support of Borghese Contemporary Hotel as technical sponsor, offers the museum’s audience the opportunity to engage directly with leading figures of contemporary Italian art. At the same time, scholars and students from the Academies and faculties of Valle Giulia will have the chance to experience and study the artist’s work up close.
For 2024, the figure of Emilio Isgrò—one of the most authoritative personalities in Italian culture, already honored at GNAM with a major retrospective in 2013 and featured in the museum’s collections—has been chosen. The selection coincides with the sixtieth anniversary of the “Cancellatura”: a radical artistic gesture that revolutionized the language of art internationally. This gesture, which defines Isgrò’s work, stems from the word and preserves memory, but is entirely distinct from the concept of “Cancel Culture,” with which it openly contrasts.
For “Artista alla GNAM,” Isgrò created the work “Isgrò cancella Isgrò”, involving the cancellation of “Autocurriculum”, his autobiographical novel, which will be donated to the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea.
Starting from May 14, Isgrò will conduct a seasonal series of “Lessons on Cancellatura” open to the public. These workshops, designed for scholars and students, will teach how to use the “brush” as a selective filter to isolate the essential.
The “Lessons on Cancellatura” will be accompanied by invitation-only evenings dedicated to “Reflections on Cancellatura”, a series of meetings involving writers, poets, journalists, and authors invited to share their personal relationship with the act of cancellation. These events will offer the public a guiding thread through the complex production of an artist who is also a poet, novelist, and playwright.
Isgrò’s Ant: The Extraordinary Nature of DNA
In the world of physics, what happens on the small scale resonates on the large scale, and vice versa. The universe appears connected by millions of invisible threads. Similarly, artist Emilio Isgrò seeks in nature the infinitely vast contained within a tiny creature such as the ant. Starting from its DNA—which has existed for millions of years, compared to the hundreds of thousands of years of Homo sapiens’ DNA—the ant holds a record of survival on Earth that humanity must acknowledge. From this perspective, insects such as bees, butterflies, and ants often appear in Isgrò’s works, beginning in the 1970s. Isgrò uses them as “mobile cancellations,” superimposing them on text to create a fruitful dialogue between nature and culture. “La formica vagabonda,” which started in San Pier Niceto, Sicily, passed through Naples and will depart from Rome, traveling through Florence and Milan before arriving in Basel. This monumental moving artwork will serve as a messenger of peace among peoples, commemorating the 60 years since the first Cancellatura of 1964.
