MACRO

The new installation by Bik Van der Pol – a house with hundreds of butterflies inspired by Mies van der Rohe’s popular Farnsworth House – is the work chosen to inaugurate the new wing of the MACRO museum.

On display, for the first time, “Homines” by Mario Ballocco: disturbing, cruel and desperate, stylized entities, that embody the dynamics of anthropological and social aspects of our daily lives: falling in love, conflicts, submissiveness, betrayal, cultural and political commitment and much more.

MACRO - Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Roma - hosts in the hall two large works by the Italian artist Sergio Ragalzi that have recently became part of the collection of the Museum.

The new edition of FotoGrafia, Rome's international festival of photography, whose theme this year is FUTURSPECTIVES, or “can photography predict the future?”

The project MACROwall: Eighties are Back! wants to reinterpret Italian art of the Eighties thorough a cycle of exhibitions featuring 10 artists whose different researches have characterized the production of the decade. Each artist is invited to display on the same wall two of his most representative works, an “historical” one and a more recent one, in order to allow the public to rediscover the vitality of art forms in the last years. The works are accompanied by critical reviews coming from two different generations: the younger art critic will interpret the “historical” work and vice versa.

Renewables are the new frontier of the energy that does not pollute and that governments around the world are exploiting to curb carbon dioxide emissions which are harmful to humans and the environment.

In the evocative space of La Pelanda in MACRO Testaccio, Bernardo Siciliano presents Naked City, an exhibition curated by Maria Ida Gaeta and Lea Mattarella: on display large canvases of female nudes and small or medium sized paintings of New York, where the artist has been living for more than ten years.

The growth of the suburbs of Rome and its transformations emphasize the need for a critical approach in the perception of the urban dimension of the city.

The exhibition Past Forward Toward Future, curated by 3/3, and sponsored by the Comune di Roma, Assessorato alle Politiche Culturali e della Comunicazione - Sovraintendenza ai Beni Culturali, in the framework of Rome Architecture Festival – Index Urbis, takes in examination this dimension making a comparison between two projects by Joel Sternfeld, which retrieve suggestions from the past and the inspirations for the future of the city.

A master of contemporary art rethinks one of the MACRO’s rooms, turning it into a space of pulsating energy and immersing the visitor in a total experience, both physically and psychically.
Thanks to a project conceived by Gilberto Zorio specifically for the rooms of the MACRO, one of the halls of the museum will be transformed into one of his great work aimed at the physical and emotional involvement of the audience. As often happens in his works, Zorio’s exhibition is a sort of work in progress, which gives the space a constantly changing identity, through the signs and the traces of different, unusual, changeable and unstable materials.

The hall on the second floor of the MACRO, which was recently renovated and is connected to the new wing of the museum, is dedicated to the Portuguese artist João Louro. A world where nothing is as it seems, a universe in which vision short-circuits with language and create original expressive works of art.
One of the halls of the Museum houses My Dark Places, a solo exhibition of the Portuguese artist João Louro (Lisbon, 1963), curated by Luca Massimo Barbero. The exhibition space showcases new works – part of the series Blind Images – created especially for the exhibition. A selection of works closely linked together, inspired by the seemingly unrelated concepts of “fear” and “pleasure” and by literary references to James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia and the works of the Marquis de Sade.
The formal minimalism and the chromatic purity of the large monochromes contrast ironically with the quotes at the bottom of the work, which are similar to captions or subtitles. The observer does not find a simple explanation or description in these texts, but new suggestions which open the mind and the senses to different and distant worlds, full of philosophical and literary quotations.

The MACRO SPECIAL PROJECTS program, begun in the summer of 2009, brings young artists the possibility of interacting with the Museum’s alternative gallery spaces. Artists such as Francesco Simeti and the Cuoghi Corsello duo took over the open-plan elevator shafts and semi-circular walls in the atrium bringing a new life and meaning to the spaces. The metamorphoses of these spaces continues with Luca Trevisani, breathing new life into Museum’s corridors.

An evolution of Gibbous and Waning, Trevisani’s work Space is a Garden to Cultivate, through its at once organic and artificial forms represents the lunar phases within cosmic space. The images evoke tidal rhythms, astral movements, stellar geometry, and the forces and entities which, determining times and seasons, govern human life. Interested by the influence the moon exerts on individuals, the artist uses industrial PVC surfaces on which he represents forms to evoke the gravitational pull on bodies. Two complimentary images face each other and dialogue in a game of attraction and repulsion, thus generating a celestial choreography based on complimentary, reciprocal, and multiplying points of view.

DigitaLife is an opportunity to offer a complex-free perspective on the future:without naivety but without solemnity. an assumed future.