Exhibition sponsored by the Tuscany region and the city of Prato




curated by Marco Senaldi

Exhibition rooms Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art, Prato
9th October - 27th November 2011

From 9th October to 27th November 2011 the Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art in Prato presents the personal exhibition of ATHOS ONGARO, curated by Marco Senaldi in close collaboration with the artist.
Athos Ongaro is an irregular artist who, systematically in over forty years of activity, has tried not to be pigeon-holed in mainstream artistic trends and has used his work to demonstrate how such classifications are actually questionable and ultimately misleading. An artist is usually described as "irregular" in deference to the idea that his position is bold, but not very clear. In reality, what indicates bravery, risk-taking and future uncertainty is going down new paths, travelling light and venturing into little-known territory. Ongaro is a brave, irregular subject in this very sense.

His art retains a share of ambiguity which resists all interpretation. An inexhaustible mise-en-scene can be witnessed in his works, with appearances from figures from the Minoan civilisation, classical mythology, Christianity, mannerism and neoclassicism, but also from liberty style, minimalism, the world of fairy stories and American cartoons – elements which are always re-read with an original twist and are often mocking but irreverent only in appearance.
Ongaro's works, be they sculptures, bas-reliefs, mosaics or paintings, give life to a universe of layered meaning, full of cross-references and of great impact. Away from trends and fashions, he has built a coherent "consistency plan" in perfect synchrony with his radical anachronism, which is highlighted by the exhibition. The conception of the exhibition underlines Ongaro's poetics, which are arranged along two expressive axes that together are idealogical: on one hand, dissolution of every stable identification with a mode, a manner or a predefined style; on the other hand, the redistribution of diverse materials obtained on an essentially parallel plane. Classical, mannerism, baroque, post-modern, but also minimalism, pop and appropriation art are categories which are shifted around relative to themselves, bewildered by their own identity. It is this shifting that gives Ongaro's research that particular atmosphere of "existential" uncertainty which forms his specific charm.
In his works there is always a confrontation with materials, techniques and manual skill which removes any doubt and appeases the intellectual uncertainty. Each creation is a talisman, an object with a magical (indeed miraculous) power that touches and heals the sick soul.
As the political journalist Saverio Vertone wrote, in Ongaro's works there is always "something strange… because of the unusual blend of realism and artifice, because of the extravagant hyperbole of minute reality and its daily grimaces; and also because of the latent rift between the Lombroso precision of the physiognomy and the great distance of the light". The exhibition includes original works from when the artist started out in the early 1970s, works which are an introduction to what the artist would later affirm in his sculptures in the 80s and 90s: the reconsideration of the role of the “classical” in our iconographic baggage; the co-existence of "classical, neoclassical, anti-classical"; and the recovery of Minoan art with its ancestral, yet frighteningly modern, shapes as a distinct, autonomous example. In pictorial production after the year 2000, a turning-point year for Ongaro, influences appear from the most disparate of symbolic worlds: from Minoan statues to Duchamp, from hip, animated cartoons such as Chicken & Cow, to references to fairy stories like Pinocchio or Little Red Riding Hood, from the stone heads of the Moai to literary characters like Lolita. Every reference is placed within a cosmic-landscape framework which encompasses the meaning and idealises its function. In the exhibition, the visitor is invited to read Ongaro's works as a sequence of parables, like a series of tales from The Arabian Nights, like a series of spells generated by the magic of this solitary cowboy of modern art.


Artist's biography

Athos Ongaro
He was born in Eraclea, Venice, in 1947; he lives and works in Belgrade and Pietrasanta (Lucca). He held his first solo exhibition in 1970 at the Bertesca Gallery in Milan. He then went on to exhibit at the Attico Gallery in Rome in 1976, the Piramide Gallery in Florence in 1980, the Annina Nosei Gallery in New York in 1983 and 1995, the Ariete Gallery in Milan in 1985, the Carini Gallery in Florence in 1988 and 1991, the Sperone Westwater Gallery in New York in 1989, the Sperone Gallery in Roma in 1993, the Sergio Tossi Gallery in Prato in 1998, the Borgogno Gallery in Milan in 2001 and the Astuni Gallery in Pietrasanta in 2003. His numerous participations in group exhibitions include the Art and criticism (Arte e critica) exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome in 1980, the 41st Venice Biennial in 1984 and the Quadrennial in Rome in 1987.

A new monograph has been published by Allemandi, Turin, to accompany the exhibition. The publication includes an essay by Marco Senaldi, unpublished theoretical texts by Athos Ongaro and a conversation between the artist and Saverio Vertone, which took place in Turin in 2011 just before his death.


Athos Ongaro (9th October – 27th November 2011)
curated by Marco Senaldi
Exhibition Rooms
Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art, Prato
Viale della Repubblica, 277 - Prato
Entrance fee: whole 4 Euro, reduced 3 Euro
Times: every day 10 am – 7pm. Closed Tuesdays