Marco Tirelli - exhibition at the House of Arts in České Budějovice
Date: February 20 – March 20, 2020
Opening: February 19, 2020, 6:00 PM
Curator: Michal Škoda
Location: Náměstí Přemysla Otakara II. 38, České Budějovice
The first foreign artist to be presented in 2020 at the Contemporary Art and Architecture Gallery in České Budějovice is Marco Tirelli; an author whose work is based on the relationship between light and darkness and geometric forms that reflect a long series of Tirelli's obsessions with time, space, and everything that lies beyond them.
The architectural character of the works, with contrasts of light and shadow, evokes movement between revelation and disappearance, which is also a testament to the artist's vision of seeking the mystery of the visible and its original inner image. The aim is to activate the viewer's mental and sensory involvement.
Marco Tirelli, born in 1956 in Rome, was already drawing as a child and was in contact with friends of his father, who worked in the management of the Swiss Institute in Rome. The Tirelli family lived in the large nineteenth-century Villa Maraini in Rome, owned by the Swiss Institute, where the fifteen-year-old future artist Tirelli, due to his drawing talent, had his own studio. Later, at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, Tirelli studied scenography under the guidance of the renowned Toti Scialoia. At that time, he became a great admirer of the Swiss scenographer Adolphe Appia. Together with the theories and sketches of Gordon Craig, Appia's theories and sketches were the result of undeniable initial influence on the "theatrical" conception of the scene of metaphysical painting.
Tirelli's work soon earned recognition – when he was only twenty years old, he was selected for the 40th Venice Biennale with a solo project at the invitation of Tommaso Trini. At the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, the author opened his studio, located on the top floor of a former pasta factory in San Lorenzo, an industrial area of Rome, where he still works today. There in the old Pastificio Cerere, Tirelli contributed to the establishment of one of the important movements in Italian art, the New Roman School, also known as Scuola di San Lorenzo. Tirelli established himself on the art scene in the early 1980s along with the aforementioned New Roman School but in a very individual position compared to other members of this group. Italian art critic Achille Bonito Oliva described these artists as "bearers of individual poetics and all currents towards a common aesthetic mentality and moral vision of art." Gradually, with Tirelli's development, a number of solo exhibitions emerged in Italy and abroad, as well as participation in international biennials such as the Biennale in Sydney, Säo Paulo, and again in Venice. In 1990, an exhibition held at the American Academy in Rome was significant for the author, featuring a dialogue between Tirelli's drawings and wall works by Sol LeWitt.
Today, the author has a long series of both solo and collective exhibitions around the world, notably in 2010 and 2015 at the Venetian Palazzo Fortuny, MACRO in Rome in 2012, the Venice Biennale in 2013, the Museum of Art in Saint Etienne in 2017, and at the Axel Vervoordt Gallery in Antwerp and Hong Kong in 2018. Works by Marco Tirelli can be found in collections and museums in countries such as Italy, Austria, France, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and the United States.
The artist's effort to show what cannot be seen draws inspiration in a free and modern way from some fundamental features of the Metaphysical Art of Giorgio De Chirico and Giorgio Morandi. His geometry shares much with three-dimensional forms that fill the disappearing perspectives of De Chirico's quiet cities and Morandi's still lifes from 1918 and 1919, where geometric elements maintain a contradictory interplay between illusion and reality.
A fundamental aspect of Tirelli's work is space. He views painting as a rational tool focused on analyzing our perception of reality, which is based on the considerations of philosophers across time and countries. From Plato, Kant to Leibniz and Nietzsche, who came together to focus on space as a central theme.
The author's work consists of drawings, sculptures - both studies and standalone works, large-format paintings, wall paintings, and installations. His metaphysical forms draw inspiration from the concept of representation and perception, as an optical transformation of shapes in our vision, which are passively found within us as ordinary objects. Tirelli creates paintings oscillating on the edge between concreteness and conceptuality, tangibility and mentalism, as well as between reality and symbol, revealing what lies beyond their boundaries. He believes that art can serve as a means to access a world beyond reality, transporting the viewer away from the concrete to another, highly "poetic" world. One could say that the objects he paints are merely a pretext to explore the inexplicable, to lead his journey to the boundaries of time, which is the true protagonist of many of his paintings.
For his first solo exhibition in the Czech Republic, Marco Tirelli chose a concept representing two important planes of his most contemporary work. It consists of drawings and interventions made through wall painting and objects. The viewer thus has the opportunity to find themselves in the author's "world" of one hundred and twenty drawings covering three gallery walls, drawing us into a kind of Tirelli's private archive - a diary of a poetic universe of images immersed in a maze of memory, where the author, through this mental map, reveals a series of his visions and inspirations. The second part of the gallery is then "occupied" by wall works - paintings, where the homogeneous use of black color enclosed in a perfect circle helps to focus attention on the objects placed in their centers. Here, the author addresses, in fact as in many of his paintings, questions of three-dimensionality and the limits of our imagination and perception.
"The world is everything that happens at the boundary between light and shadow, everything that is and what could be in my consciousness." (Marco Tirelli)
More information >
Opening: February 19, 2020, 6:00 PM
Curator: Michal Škoda
Location: Náměstí Přemysla Otakara II. 38, České Budějovice
The first foreign artist to be presented in 2020 at the Contemporary Art and Architecture Gallery in České Budějovice is Marco Tirelli; an author whose work is based on the relationship between light and darkness and geometric forms that reflect a long series of Tirelli's obsessions with time, space, and everything that lies beyond them.
The architectural character of the works, with contrasts of light and shadow, evokes movement between revelation and disappearance, which is also a testament to the artist's vision of seeking the mystery of the visible and its original inner image. The aim is to activate the viewer's mental and sensory involvement.
Marco Tirelli, born in 1956 in Rome, was already drawing as a child and was in contact with friends of his father, who worked in the management of the Swiss Institute in Rome. The Tirelli family lived in the large nineteenth-century Villa Maraini in Rome, owned by the Swiss Institute, where the fifteen-year-old future artist Tirelli, due to his drawing talent, had his own studio. Later, at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, Tirelli studied scenography under the guidance of the renowned Toti Scialoia. At that time, he became a great admirer of the Swiss scenographer Adolphe Appia. Together with the theories and sketches of Gordon Craig, Appia's theories and sketches were the result of undeniable initial influence on the "theatrical" conception of the scene of metaphysical painting.
Tirelli's work soon earned recognition – when he was only twenty years old, he was selected for the 40th Venice Biennale with a solo project at the invitation of Tommaso Trini. At the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, the author opened his studio, located on the top floor of a former pasta factory in San Lorenzo, an industrial area of Rome, where he still works today. There in the old Pastificio Cerere, Tirelli contributed to the establishment of one of the important movements in Italian art, the New Roman School, also known as Scuola di San Lorenzo. Tirelli established himself on the art scene in the early 1980s along with the aforementioned New Roman School but in a very individual position compared to other members of this group. Italian art critic Achille Bonito Oliva described these artists as "bearers of individual poetics and all currents towards a common aesthetic mentality and moral vision of art." Gradually, with Tirelli's development, a number of solo exhibitions emerged in Italy and abroad, as well as participation in international biennials such as the Biennale in Sydney, Säo Paulo, and again in Venice. In 1990, an exhibition held at the American Academy in Rome was significant for the author, featuring a dialogue between Tirelli's drawings and wall works by Sol LeWitt.
Today, the author has a long series of both solo and collective exhibitions around the world, notably in 2010 and 2015 at the Venetian Palazzo Fortuny, MACRO in Rome in 2012, the Venice Biennale in 2013, the Museum of Art in Saint Etienne in 2017, and at the Axel Vervoordt Gallery in Antwerp and Hong Kong in 2018. Works by Marco Tirelli can be found in collections and museums in countries such as Italy, Austria, France, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and the United States.
The artist's effort to show what cannot be seen draws inspiration in a free and modern way from some fundamental features of the Metaphysical Art of Giorgio De Chirico and Giorgio Morandi. His geometry shares much with three-dimensional forms that fill the disappearing perspectives of De Chirico's quiet cities and Morandi's still lifes from 1918 and 1919, where geometric elements maintain a contradictory interplay between illusion and reality.
A fundamental aspect of Tirelli's work is space. He views painting as a rational tool focused on analyzing our perception of reality, which is based on the considerations of philosophers across time and countries. From Plato, Kant to Leibniz and Nietzsche, who came together to focus on space as a central theme.
The author's work consists of drawings, sculptures - both studies and standalone works, large-format paintings, wall paintings, and installations. His metaphysical forms draw inspiration from the concept of representation and perception, as an optical transformation of shapes in our vision, which are passively found within us as ordinary objects. Tirelli creates paintings oscillating on the edge between concreteness and conceptuality, tangibility and mentalism, as well as between reality and symbol, revealing what lies beyond their boundaries. He believes that art can serve as a means to access a world beyond reality, transporting the viewer away from the concrete to another, highly "poetic" world. One could say that the objects he paints are merely a pretext to explore the inexplicable, to lead his journey to the boundaries of time, which is the true protagonist of many of his paintings.
For his first solo exhibition in the Czech Republic, Marco Tirelli chose a concept representing two important planes of his most contemporary work. It consists of drawings and interventions made through wall painting and objects. The viewer thus has the opportunity to find themselves in the author's "world" of one hundred and twenty drawings covering three gallery walls, drawing us into a kind of Tirelli's private archive - a diary of a poetic universe of images immersed in a maze of memory, where the author, through this mental map, reveals a series of his visions and inspirations. The second part of the gallery is then "occupied" by wall works - paintings, where the homogeneous use of black color enclosed in a perfect circle helps to focus attention on the objects placed in their centers. Here, the author addresses, in fact as in many of his paintings, questions of three-dimensionality and the limits of our imagination and perception.
"The world is everything that happens at the boundary between light and shadow, everything that is and what could be in my consciousness." (Marco Tirelli)
More information >
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