CLAUDIO ABATE
SUPERFICIE SENSIBILE
SUPERFICIE SENSIBILE
Rome, MAXXI | Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo
March 3 – June 4, 2023
Exhibition views: © Musacchio, Ianniello, Pasqualini & Fucilla. Courtesy Fondazione MAXXI, Rome
Produced in collaboration with the Archivio Claudio Abate
Curated by Ilaria Bernardi and Bartolomeo Pietromarchi
The exhibition is dedicated to the artists’ photographer Claudio Abate (Rome,1943-2017) who immortalized the artistic and theatrical avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s, and not only in Rome. He ‘fixed’ unrepeatable performances through his lens, taking photographs that are works of art in and of themselves. He lived and worked alongside the most prestigious Italian and international artists, from Carmelo Bene to Living Theater, from Jannis Kounellis and Pino Pascali to Joseph Beuys, accompanying and rewriting the history of art of the last 50 years through images.
The exhibition presents a visual narrative of Claudio Abate through a selection of around 150 images; some are famous, some little-known, some even unpublished; some were restored for the occasion together with the original iron frames, and others were printed specifically for the exhibition.
The exhibition path is developed by core themes that use wall sequences in order to retrace the photographer’s most frequent collaborations and interests, as supplemented by audio contributions (with testimonies by Achille Bonito Oliva, Daniela Lancioni, Piero Pizzi Cannella and Fabio Sargentini) and in-depth showcases that testify to the way each photograph functions as a ‘portal’ to a world of meanings and stories. The exhibition design is fluid and enveloping: as they create their performances, the images of the artists stand out on curved magenta-red walls reminiscent of the theater – with viewers feeling as though they were reliving those performances.
The exhibition sections are respectively dedicated to: Abate’s first photographs concerning artists such as Mario Schifano and Pino Pascali; his collaboration with Carmelo Bene; his professional relationship with L’Attico gallery; his collaboration with Jannis Kounellis; Abate’s photographs concerning major exhibitions in Italy and abroad including arte povera più azioni povere curated by Germano Celant in Amalfi in 1968; Abate’s collaboration with galleries, studios, and the most active institutions on the Roman scene until the 2000s; his artistic-photographic experiments titled Contatti con la superficie sensibile (1972) exhibited on the occasion of Abate’s first solo show in Rome’s Palazzo Taverna; some of Abate’s vintage photographs from the Incontri Internazionali d’Arte Archive preserved at MAXXI thanks to Gabriella Buontempo’s donation.