Exhibition dedicated to Lucio Amelio at the Mother Museum

An exhibition to celebrate Lucio Amelio, one of the protagonists of world contemporary art who made Naples an important center of artistic production

SECURITY UPDATE TRAINING

Lucio Amelio's exhibition has been extended until 6 April 2015.

---

Il Mother Museum of Naples devotes an exhibition to Lucio Amelio, the famous Neapolitan gallery owner and one of the indisputable protagonists of international contemporary art, on the occasion of the twenty years since his death.

From 22 November 2014 to ~~9 March 2015~~ 6 April 2015 you can therefore visit the exhibition Lucio Amelio, from the modern art agency to the genesis of terrae motus (1965-1982). Documents, works, a story ..., which will retrace the history of the man who contributed to making Naples one of the most important centers of artistic production and reflection in recent decades at a national and international level. At the same time, the story of the artists, collaborators and fellow travelers who shared their research with Amelio, through their famous works, will also be told.

The exhibition itinerary will lead visitors to discover one of the most flourishing periods of contemporary art in Naples, starting with the opening, in 1964, of the Modern Art Agency in the Parco Margherita, founded by Lucio Amelio to host artists of international importance such as Rauschenberg, Merz and Kounellis, promote new public art projects, support large institutional exhibitions, including those at Villa Pignatelli and the Reggia di Capodimonte, intense publishing activity and the organization of personal exhibitions collective. Since the seventies, thanks also to Lucio Amelio, the movements of the Arte Povera and the Transavanguardia and relations between American and European art deepened. In fact, it was Amelio himself in the 1980 to introduce Joseph Beuys to Andy Warhol and from this meeting the portrait exhibition “Beuys by Warhol” was born.

After the earthquake of 80 Lucio Amelio decided to involve 50 international artists in the exhibition Terrae Motus, to collect their reactions to a devastating event such as the earthquake in Irpinia (November 23, 1980) and that they left their "mark" on posterity through their works.

Terrae Motus, designed by Lucio Amelio

The project was attended by artists such as Enzo Cucchi, Luciano Fabro, Gilbert & George, Andy Warhol, Richard Long, Mimmo Paladino, Giulio Paolini, Gerhard Richter, Emilio Vedova, and many others. The great exhibition was presented in 1984 at Villa Campolieto in Herculaneum, and is still on permanent display today at the Royal Palace of Caserta.

Terrae Motus confirmed the active and direct involvement of art in the social, civil and cultural context always sought by Amelio who, not by chance, towards the end of his activity, conceived, around the collection Terrae Motus which symbolically "closes" the exhibition of the Madre Museum.

The first rooms exhibit research works on relationships between abstraction and figuration at the end of the sixties (with works by Renato Barisani, Lucio Fontana. Piero Manzoni, Paolo Scheggi, up to the subsequent collaboration with Alberto Burri). The rooms dedicated to the artists of thePoor art, with works by Pierpaolo Calzolari, Luciano Fabro, Mario and Marisa Merz, Giulio Paolini, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Gilberto Zorio and Jannis Kounellis, up to the rooms dedicated to Pop Art and “revolutionary” art and Beuysian “social sculpture”.

In the second part of the exhibition there are works by artists such as Francesco Clemente, Mimmo Paladino and Ernesto Tatafiore, alongside the works of Tony Cragg, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerard Richter and Cy Twombly. The selection on the third floor of the exhibition closes photographic and film works, including those of Gilbert & George and Mimmo Jodice, and a large one documentation room which includes a portrait of Amelio by Mario Schifano connected to the project's launch Terrae Motus.

The exhibition of the Madre museum intends to understand the importance of Lucio Amelio in the Neapolitan artistic scene, national and international, and his being, still today, a source of great inspiration, in his constant search for a stringent implication between art and community to which today even a museum like the Mother must, in part, its own raison d'être as a conscious and responsible witness to this intellectual and institutional heritage.