ELISABETTA CATALANO. 'BETWEEN PHOTOGRAPHY AND PERFORMANCE' at Maxxi in Rome

ELISABETTA CATALANO Tra immagine e performance

MAXXI Archive Wall | 3 April - 22 December 2019 | Admission free

www.maxxi.art |#ElisabettaCatalano

Rome, 2 April 2019. A great photographer. Four remarkable artists portrayed during the gestational phase of four extraordinary performances in the studio.
The focus show ELISABETTA CATALANO. Tra immagine e performance opens to the public on 3 April 2019. The exhibition has been produced by #maxxi, National museum of 21st century arts, in collaboration with the Archivio Catalano and curated by Aldo Enrico Ponis, with consultancy from Laura Cherubini (MAXXI Archive Wall, admission free, through to 22 December 2019).

At the heart of the exhibition the performances of Joseph Beuys, Scultura invisibile (1973), Fabio Mauri, Europa bombardata (1978) Vettor Pisani, Lo scorrevole (1972) and Cesare Tacchi, Painting (1972), recounted through photos that were destined to become iconic images of the performance itself.
A dual tribute, therefore: to one of the great post-war Italian photographers, a testimony through her elegant and sensitive lens to a generation of artists and intellectuals and, at the same time, to the history of performance art.

“If we cannot reconstruct the development of a performance”, explains the curator Aldo Enrico Ponis, “to recreate that complicity between the two artists, one expressing themselves through their works, the other through the photographic medium, the final, iconic image will remain as the sole testimony to something that we can only intuit, remaining beyond comprehension.”

The exhibition features slides, colour photos, vintage prints, correspondence and proofs, documents recounting the complexity of the creative process: how is a performance born? When and where does it take place? In which spaces? What interactions are there between artist, photographer, performer, actors and collaborators?
In order to respond to these questions, the project investigates the gestational phases making up the performative process destined to be realised in the studio and therefore documented through photographs: from the first ideas to the backstage, from the choice of spaces for the presentation to the details of the costumes, from the lighting to the backdrops, from the moments of action to the immobility of the images. From an initial exploration of the idea one therefore moves on to its actuation and finally the most delicate and demanding moment for the photographer: the selection of the most significant shots, the moment in which, on the contact sheets, a few marks, certain images ringed in red, identify and fix the iconic, definitive image of the performance.

This precious process is revealed to visitors to MAXXI’s Archive Wall through an exhibition that brings back to the public space an important episode from the artistic sphere.

ELISABETTA CATALANO. Tra immagine e performance

di Laura Cherubini

The society depicted by #elisabettacatalano is rooted in artistic and cultural production and is comprised of artists, intellectuals, poets and the works that their faces reflect. It is the portrait of a free community of thought and creation whose working method is not the result of a cold sociological vision, but is actually based upon participation and the sharing of creative processes. The many portraits that Catalano made of artists, a selection of which was presented at Luce Monachesi’s gallery of Rome in 1973, testify to this relationship. Weiner, Gilbert & George, Boetti, Merz, Pascali, Kosuth, De Dominicis, Kounellis, Rotella and Castellani were among said artists. Some of those relationships translated into more specific professional relations, thereby leading to actual collaborations. Many artists used Catalano’s images in order to produce works of art. In particular, the ‘70s saw Catalano produce photographic sequences, which were often born or reconstructed in her studio, in order to document the actions and performances of various artists. A fully- fledged genre was born in her studio: the artists would carry out closed-door performances in the absence of an audience so as to enable Catalano to take pictures. Said pictures were meant to be passed on rather than consumed, in a silent dialogue between the iconography of the artist and the eye of the photographer. Indeed, Elisabetta Catalano’s work as portraitist was what caught the attention of artists in a time when the human body and face were the subject of choice of art. Catalano’s clear photographic language confers a permanent character upon otherwise ephemeral actions by capturing poses. As in portraits, the photographer shows great psychological intuition, which enables her to capture the inner reality of people. Therefore, a clever interpretation of the artist’s work emerges from this kind of photography.

The Archive, which focuses not only on conservation, but also on research, wants to breathe further life into these images by showing the sequences, proofs and itineraries that are typical of four different kinds of performance: the artist as a performer; the artist and the model; the model without the artist; the portrait as a performance.

www.maxxi.art