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may 13, 2016 - Galleria Christian Stein

MIMMO PALADINO at Christian Stein Gallery in Milan

The exhibition of more than twenty significant works and several celebrated installations, taken together, comprises a complete picture of the creative career, from the beginnings to the present day, of one of Italy’s most important contemporary artists.

Featuring a reconstruction, after 28 years, of the major installation first presented at the Venice Biennale in 1988.

From 12 May to 8 October 2016, the Christian Stein Gallery is hosting an extensive retrospective of the works of #mimmopaladino (Paduli, 1948), curated by Eduardo Cicelyn, in its two venues in Milan (Corso Monforte) and Pero (Via V. Monti).
Through the medium of some twenty paintings and sculptures, together with several famous installations, this single event develops on its theme in two locations, narrating the genesis and the most significant milestones in the creative career of one of Italy’s most important contemporary artists.
Organised in seven thematic sections, a visit to the exhibition should start with the Milan venue, which gathers together the debut works of Paladino in his young days, when he applied himself to painting as an avenue for defining his identity, back in the seventies.
The largest of the six rooms available in Pero will therefore host the faithful reconstruction – for the first time in 28 years – of the major installation that was first presented at the 1988 Venice Biennale. This is the work that was destined to provide the fulcrum around which the adventure of an artist who had by then acquired maturity and self-awareness would orbit. It was in fact on the occasion of the Biennale that Paladino demonstrated his ability to re-elaborate and extend his work, breaking out of the confines of the surfaces of walls with sign, colour and a wide variety of different materials.
The exhibition retraces the history of several of the issues typical of the artist’s expressive approach, from the geometries that analyse and redesign space and the sculpture that reflects the archetypal elements of form and volume to the room hosting his large paintings in the primary colours of yellows, reds, blacks and whites.
With its yellow light playing on the timbres of black and white that dot its surface, the golden room, one of the underlying elements in Paladino’s artistic lexicon, constitutes a luminous counterbalance to the major work of charred wood, fractured limbs and blackened figures consumed by flames.
Paladino’s oeuvre is conveyed here in all its complexity, revealing its conceptual and analytical formation, an essential feature of an approach to working at painting that is never random, yet ranges from references to tradition to those to the avant-gardes and also draws on archaic and non-European cultures.
Going back over the salient images from Paladino’s career, the evidence provided by his first paintings, criss-crossed by copper and wood, or flanked by 3D elements, is that many of his works have always taken the form of fully-fledged installations.
All this illustrates how Paladino’s subjects are never merely figurative. The fact is that his images are often unleashed by layers of signs and materials that create tangles and fragments as they declare, conceal, or just hint at a meaning.
What we can read in his works is the emergence of an archaic, Mediterranean culture, so that the artistic lexicon and practical work of the artist seem to be something magical in Paladino, as though he were a shaman working in a place of ritual or of tragedy. Despite being figurative and symbolic, his works conjure up meanings and contents without ever revealing their origins, but only expressing the shadow, the mask or the archetypal trace of those origins.


MIMMO PALADINO
Christian Stein Gallery, Milan (Corso Monforte, 23) and Pero (via Vincenzo Monti, 46)
12 May – 8 October 2016

Opening hours:
Milan, Tuesday-Friday: 10.00 a.m. - 1.00 p.m. and 2.00-7.00 p.m.;
Saturday: 10.00 a.m. - 1.00 p.m. and 3.00-7.00 p.m.
Pero, Tuesday-Saturday, 12.00-7.00 p.m.

For information:
Milano: Tel. +39 02 76393301; info@galleriachristianstein.com
Pero: Tel. +39 02 38100316; info@galleriachristianstein.com