Fabio Mauri
Amore Mio
30 September – 22 December 2023
Zurich, Limmatstrasse
About
Organised with Olivier Renaud-Clément, in close collaboration with Studio Fabio Mauri, ‘Fabio Mauri. Amore Mio’ is the artist’s first solo presentation in Switzerland and sheds light on a period in Mauri’s work during which the seminal Italian artist explored topics pertinent to pop art. The exhibition includes paintings, sculptures and works on paper spanning the early 1950s to the mid 1970s, as well as the installation ‘Amore mio’ (1970), on view for the first time in over 50 years.
‘Fabio Mauri. Amore Mio’ is a testament to the artist’s early engagement with themes and ideas that would come to define pop art, before the movement became well-known in Europe when US artist Robert Rauschenberg won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1964. The earliest works in the exhibition are firmly rooted in Mauri’s personal biography and family history. These historical drawings and collages in the vein of neo-dada and proto-pop include comic strips and cartoon elements which were distributed by the artist’s father, Umberto Mauri, who was among the first to import American comics to Italy. Driven by an exploration of the role that these new media have with regards to creating narrative in the post-war years, Mauri deployed fragments of Lil Abner, Popeye, Flash Gordon and Mad Magazine in his works.
About the artist
Post-war Italian artist Fabio Mauri’s practice encompasses performance, film, installation, found-object sculpture, mixed media works and theoretical writings to question readings of history and the associated power of language and ideology associated with the Second World War and the Holocaust. Sobering, direct, and poetically reflective, Mauri’s art addresses themes of communication and manipulation, and brings light to the ‘political dimension of the image,’ as it is projected and proliferated throughout contemporary society.Born in Rome in 1926, Mauri’s youth was marked by the events of war and Fascism—traumas and horrors that would profoundly impact and influence his life and work. Raised among writers and painters, Mauri befriended intellectuals in Italy’s new avant-garde, among them the novelist Italo Calvino, philosopher and semiotician Umberto Eco, film director and aficionado Pier Paolo Pasolini, visual artist Jannis Kounellis, art historian Maurizio Calvesi and the writer Edoardo Sanguineti. ‘I patiently recompose,’ the artist commented, ‘with my own hands, the experience of the shameful. I explore its mental possibilities… I behave as if that reality (that history) had not had its final condemnation, but were still adding further data right up to our time today.’
