Galleria Tega is proud to present the exhibition “The Red and the Black” featuring a selection of works by Alberto Burri, Enrico Castellani, Lucio Fontana and Piotr Uklanski.
In reference to the famous pair of hues immortalized by Stendhal, but also rigorously pertinent to the painting of four of the leading and incisive figures in 20^th and 21^st century art, the exhibition offers an opportunity for measured, contiguous observation of important works by these masters, who like few others have investigate the possible variations of the two colors, red and black.
A comparison of their results triggers stimulating reflection, which while granting the possibility of intertwined observations and considerations, leaves their respective qualities, motivations and pictorial results – in a word, their linguistic approaches – substantially distinct.
In fact, if for Burri black marks the beginning and the end of his materic-abstract path without ever losing sight of red, for Castellani, who filled many of his surfaces with red, the beginning of the sensitizing of those surfaces came with the black monochrome; similarly Fontana, the eldest of the group, when in 1947 he shaped his “spatial sculpture” in plaster, did so in black, though he devoted the rest of his “spatialist” output, with many “spatial concepts” based on “holes” and “cuts,” to the color red. Uklanski, finally, the youngest of the four, daringly ready to experiment along new paths of chromatic development, with blood in mind in the distribution of red or black on the canvas, places the observer in front of a provocative inquiry on authenticity and falsehood, the virtual and the real.
A critical essay by Bruno Corà analyzes the many works in the exhibition, in a catalogue produced for the occasion, also tracing a brief overview of the technical, symbolic and mythical history of the two colors across different civilizations, cultures and eras.