Exhibitions

CLAUDIO PARMIGGIANI: DEMATERIALIZATION

Frist Art Museum / 919 Broadway February 2, 2019 - May 5, 2019

Claudio Parmiggiani

Italian artist Claudio Parmiggiani (b. 1943) resists classification. Though associated with the Arte Povera movement and conceptualism of the 1960s and ’70s, he works somewhere in between. His art evokes universal themes of time, absence, memory, and silence, while drawing on classical references as well as the subtle quietude of paintings by Giorgio Morandi. Parmiggiani’s signature process of delocazione (displacement) was originally inspired by the silhouettes of dust left behind after objects were removed. For more than forty years, Parmiggiani has created his own version of this effect by stoking the flames from controlled combustions, filling rooms with smoke and capturing the outlines of objects in the resulting soot. Mirroring the technical process of photograms, these haunting images record the paradoxical presence of objects now absent. This will be the artist’s first museum exhibition in the United States. Organized by the Frist Art Museum.

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Image: 

Claudio Parmiggiani. Untitled, 2014. Smoke and soot on wood, 15 x 15 in. Image courtesy of the artist and Bortolami, New York. © Claudio Parmiggiani