CESARE TACCHI
UNA RETROSPETTIVA
UNA RETROSPETTIVA
Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni
February 7 – May 6, 2018
Exhibition views: © Paolo Darra. Courtesy Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome
Promoted by Roma Capitale – Assessorato alla Crescita culturale
Conceived, produced, and organized by Azienda Speciale Palaexpo – Palazzo delle Esposizioni, in conjunction with the Archivio Cesare Tacchi
Curated by Daniela Lancioni and Ilaria Bernardi
The exhibition focuses on the works of Cesare Tacchi (Rome, 1940-2014), to whom the city of Rome is paying tribute just over three years after his death.
More than 100 works map out his career in chronological order in the halls of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni.
Beginning with a number of rare and little-known early works, the exhibition continues with a series of enamels on canvas in which the “reality of the image” is rendered through a selection of details, from racing cars to Roman public service vehicles.
A selection of some of the most successful of his so-called upholsteries, fully-fledged icons of the “happy climate of the 1960s,” are displayed alongside one another, for example the La primavera allegra from the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia.
The exhibition continues with Tacchi’s sculptures of 1967, object-pictures as the artist used to called them, yet preventing any chance for practical use, like the large pictureless frame from La Galleria Nazionale.
The renowned and extreme gesture of the Cancellazione d’artista that Tacchi made during the Teatro delle Mostre festival at La Tartaruga in Rome in May 1968 is evoked by a “relic” displayed for the very first time at this exhibition. The same room hosts the works he produced immediately after the Cancellation, in which his artistic language’s potential for communication is sorely tested with encroachments into a totally aphasic dimension.
He moved on from there to a new phase which was epiphanic in nature and whose emblems, both dating back to 1972, are Painting, a photographic work realized by Elisabetta Catalano in which the artist proposes the diametrically opposite action to Cancellation, and a video, Il rito, of a performance at the Incontri Internazionali d’Arte in Rome in which Tacchi reconsecrated the exhibition space by kissing it.
The last room hosts a bronze sculpture and large paintings produced since the 1980s, the successful expression of a new language adopted by the artist.