Emilio Isgrò

Tornabuoni Arte is delighted to announce the opening of Emilio Isgrò’s exhibition, in our restyled gallery, in via Fatebenefratelli (Milan), on Friday October 14.
Isgrò is considered to be among one of the greatest innovators of the artistic language after WWII. His unique and original research, his rigorous and independent experimentations have undoubtedly made him, along with Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni and Paolo Scheggi, one of the main protagonists of Contemporary Art.
For more than 50 years, Isgrò has used the erasure technique, conceiving a brand new philosophy of the vision, which narrates and interprets the world with a significant aesthetical and communicational force: a quality on which great Art has always relied on.
Since the early 1960s, Isgrò has covered words and images under a cloak of heavy marks, as if they were black or white velarium, expressing the fact that even shadowed their presence is still strong. As years passed by, this simple, yet not provocative nor disruptive, technique started appearing on maps, telex, musical scores, newspapers, pictures, and eventually evolved into installations and artworks full of original conceptual meaning. The varieties of Isgrò’s pictorial universe have been wonderfully represented in the most recent exhibitions on the artist held in Palazzo Reale, Gallerie d’Italia and Casa del Manzoni, which have received critical acclaim and success among the visitors.
These exhibitions emphasized the beginning of Isgrò as an author, as a theorist of visual poetry and as a precursor of conceptual art, of which however he has never approved its narrow theoretical limitations. Moreover, the exhibitions shown how his experimental research has had the courage to go back to speech and to the ethical commitment, that everybody avoided. They also focused on how he confronted himself with Globalization, in order to center the attention back to the importance of exchange and beginnings within the Mediterranean culture.
The subjects that Isgrò deals with in his work are indissolubly tied to a cultural and historical consideration: they talk about our days and never turn into banal stories. The artist dialogues and constantly confronts himself with the audience, believing that empathy is the only thing able to overturn the traditional relationship among the artist, his artwork and the observer.
Tornabuoni Arte’s exhibition displays a concise excursus of Isgrò’s work, starting from some of his best-known pieces, such as the erased books and the first telex made in the early 1970s, and ending with his most recent, unpublished works, in which the grid of the erasures has abandoned the written pages and now lays on renown iconographies of cultural or artistic spheres.
Isgrò’s artworks are provided with a great pictorial sensitivity, like the remarkable portraits of Girolamo Savonarola, Giotto or Michelangelo Buonarroti, Italian geniuses, and today also commercial icons. By leaving visible only small parts of a sentence, Isgrò puts into doubt their identity, yet emphasizing on their great ethical and aesthetical value. Furthermore, in the 2012 cycle dedicated to saints, the artist honours their great testimony of life, but also uses irony to criticize Italy, the land of “saints, poets and navigators.”
From civil subjects to the pillars of History, from experimentations to the most recent pictorial research, from the Mediterranean to Globalization, Isgrò has always given attention to the reconstruction of knowledge, in favour of a new art and of a new society. 

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