Cookie Consent by Free Privacy Policy website AGNETTI. A cent’anni da adesso in Milan, at Palazzo Reale
august 16, 2017 - Comune di Milano

AGNETTI. A cent’anni da adesso in Milan, at Palazzo Reale

The anthological exhibition curated by Marco Meneguzzo with the Archivio #vincenzoagnetti narrates the creative experiences of one of the leading representatives of conceptual art of the 1970s.






From 4 July to 24 September 2017, Milan’s Palazzo Reale will host an anthological exhibition devoted to #vincenzoagnetti (1926–1981), the Italian conceptual artist who transformed words into iconic images and images into poetry. 


The exhibition entitled AGNETTI. A cent’anni da adesso (A Hundred Years from Now), promoted and produced by Comune di Milano-Cultura, the Palazzo Reale and the Archivio #vincenzoagnetti, is curated by Marco Meneguzzo with the Archivio #vincenzoagnetti. Through critical and “sentimental” analysis it invites us to rediscover the artistic universe of #vincenzoagnetti, grasping its originality, critical rigour, poetics and extraordinary contemporaneity. 


It features more than a hundred works executed between 1967 and 1981, and together they offer a clear image of the artist’s path: his poetic and visionary tension, his immense interest in the analysis of creative processes and in art as a statute, and his role as a linguistic investigator and disrupter of the mechanisms of power, including those of the written and spoken word, translated into clear and evocative images. Because, for Agnetti, everything is language: “Images and words form part of a single thought. At times the pause, punctuation, is achieved through images, while at others through writing itself.”


In all his works, the word is thus not limited to semiological relationships, as was often the case in the conceptual art of those years, and instead he created images, suggested investigations, built narratives. Agnetti used the visual and conceptual paradox to create interpretative short circuits ready to be processed and revisited by the observer, entrusting the development and meaning of what he had written and imagined to the spectator’s mind. To him, it was always important that the visitor continue to see the exhibition in his mind’s eye, even after leaving the gallery. 


Meneguzzo asserts, “With this #event we will discover one of the greatest conceptual artists. His conceptualism differs from both the British and American versions, but also from the European one. Vincenzo Agnetti’s has metaphysical and literary implications, full of our culture – I would say the Mediterranean culture, except today this adjective seems limiting.”




Agnetti’s artistic career was short – he died in 1981 at the age of just 54 – but was so intense and tumultuous that it is difficult to fully keep track of it. That’s why it is probably still little known and thus worth rediscovering in its multifaceted complexity: the AGNETTI. A cent’anni da adesso exhibition moves in this direction.


The exhibition examines Agnetti’s mental path, not always in chronological order but based on the logical thread of his artistic discourse, calling for associations and leaps between different periods to lead the visitor into the recesses of the creative process.
Naturally, his best-known works are on display: 
-Quando mi vidi non c’ero, his self-portrait in fire-incised and coloured grey felt, along with other felt works, Ritratti and Paesaggi
-The Assiomi: black Bakelite incised with white nitre that, through paradoxes, tautologies and enlightening syntheses of thought, are the analytical counterpoint of his production. 
-Libro dimenticato a Memoria, the work that best sums up his research into memory and forgetfulness.
-Macchina Drogata, the Olivetti Divisumma 14 calculator in which numbers are replaced with the letters of the alphabet. Each consonant is followed by a vowel, so that all the words obtained randomly by the operations will be a support for intonation, even though they are completely meaningless. This ordinary calculator, rendered incapable of carrying out its real function, becomes a producer of artwork with a powerful pictorial and iconic impact. And next to the “drugged machine” we find part of this production: semiosis, comets, fade-outs and the beautiful installation of the Apocalisse.


Among the works on display, visitors can admire the room devoted to Amleto Politico: 60 flags from all the countries in the world surround the stage on which Agnetti’s Hamlet harangues the crowd. The monologue of this Political Hamlet is recited by the extraordinary voice of Agnetti, who makes numbers speak as if they were a discourse, because the Political Hamlet – like the drugged machine and other works – is an operation of static theatre. 


Many of his most significant works – using photography – are here, including some of the best known, such as Autotelefonata, Tutta la Storia dell’Arte in questi tre lavori, l’Età media di A, along with less-known ones such as Architettura tradotta per tutti i popoli and others that are almost never seen, like Riserva di caccia.
Regarding the use of photography, there are works that are the outcome of altered and interrupted process that explicitly allude to the relationship between medium and message. His Photo-graffie, photographic paper exposed to light and scratched to portray the landscapes of the mind, hold a significant place: they are among his last works and here we find Le Stagioni, accompanied by the poem I dicitori, which ushers in a new path for Agnetti, more lyrical and poetic. 
Naturally, there is a room devoted to the installation entitled 4 titoli surplace: four large sculptures whose titles are represented by photographs, four shots of moments during his performance La lettera perduta. One of these was chosen as the image of the exhibition. 
Among these works, there are many important ones that we cannot list here and that allude to his research into time, notably XIV-XX secolo, four frescoes from the fourteenth century on which Agnetti has intervened with concise words.
Lastly, we can mention his association with several great artists for whom he wrote and with whom he collaborated, such as Manzoni, Castellani, Melotti, Claudio Parmiggiani, Gianni Colombo, and Paolo Scheggi, with whom he signed Il Trono, a “duet” with great visual and conceptual impact that will be displayed at the Palazzo Reale for the first time nearly fifty years after it was first shown in Rome. 


#vincenzoagnetti was born in Milan on 14 September 1926. He graduated from the Brera Academy and then continued his studies at the Piccolo Teatro school. At the age of twenty, he started to write poetry and experimented with informal painting, which he soon abandoned, leaving no trace.
The period he spent in the late 1950s and early 1960s with just a handful of friends, including Castellani and Manzoni, allowed him to share ideals, plans and artistic aspirations.  In 1959, in the journal Azimuth, he published his first “propositional”writings, “Non commettere atti impuri”, the preface of the Tavole di Accertamento e l’Intervento per la Linea by Piero Manzoni. His South American period dates to 1962, and there he worked in electronic automation. This was the period he defined as “liquidationism art no” and it is documented by his notebooks entitled Assenza. He returned to Italy in 1967 and continued his research in the field of art criticism with writings for artist friends such as Castellani and Melotti, and with short theoretical essays published in journals but also recited as monologues. In 1967 he also commenced the artistic production he would develop with great intensity and richness that can only be explained by his premonition of an untimely death. The production of works followed at a dizzying pace, but this did not keep Agnetti from explaining their meaning, with specific references to the structure and its genesis.
In 1968, with the novel Obsoleto he launched the “Denarratori” series published byScheiwiller, with a cover by Enrico Castellani, and he self-published his thesis, which would not be published until 1970. 
In the meantime, Agnetti left again to work, first in Norway and then Qatar, short experiences that nevertheless fuelled his artistic activity. A sequence of exhibitions and his presence in international shows inspired him to experiment with types of works using different aesthetics, while continuing the same discourse. In 1973 he also opened a studio in New York, where he lived intermittently, commuting between Milan and the Big Apple, and this gave him important inspiration for his work. On 1 September 1981 he died suddenly in Milan, leaving the unfinished work Il Lucernario and several verses, written a short time earlier in New York, that ended like this: Before the short evening | we will return to take up arms | We will be in Earth in Sun in Air. | Then with the player of flowers. Perhaps.


The exhibition is free of charge. The exhibition itinerary starts on the ground floor of the Palazzo Reale with a bookshop – reading room open to visitors of the “AGNETTI. A cent’anni da adesso” and “Giancarlo Vitali. Time Out” exhibitions.




AGNETTI. A cent’anni da adesso
Milan, Palazzo Reale
4 July – 24 September 2017


Free admission


Hours: 
Monday: 2.30 – 7.30 p.m.
Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday: 9.30 a.m. – 7.30 p.m.
Thursday and Saturday: 9.30 a.m. – 10.30 p.m.
 (last entry 1 hour before closing)


Website: 
www.palazzorealemilano.it
www.vincenzoagnetti.com


Catalogue: Silvana Editoriale