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NEW AMBIENT-ART BY AT THE PEGGY GUGGENHEIM COLLECTION July 6 - August 4, 2002

5 July 2002, 5 pm: press conference

A new work by the Italian artist Agostino Bonalumi, in the form of a complete environment, has been conceived and created for the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Titled White Ambience, Space Withheld and Invaded it occupies a gallery in the exhibition Themes and Variations. Post-war Art from the Guggenheim Collections. Bonalumi is among the first artists to have experimented with ambiental works of art, and as early as the 1960s created a series of environments aimed at manipulating the senses of the spectator (in Foligno in 1967, later at the Biennale, and in various installations in German and American galleries). The visitor enters the space of the work of art not as a passive witness but as an active participant.

The work is an overwhelming experience of visual sensation—a limitless space (perceptually and virtually) in which the walls, the illuminated ceiling and the floor are impalpably white, vibrant and measureless. Our normal assessments of the physical and tactile equivalent of what we see is confounded by the spacial deformations caused by the ‘extroflexion’ of the canvas walls that intrude into the room: this manipulated space in the timeless white envronment offers the visitor a rich and strange sensorial disorientation.

On June 8, the exhibition Themes and Variations entered its third and final phase. Curated by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection Associate Curator Luca Massimo Barbero, the new installation offers once more a sequence of thematic rooms which lead the visitor on a journey of discovery where little known works in Peggy Guggenheim’s collection can be seen next to paintings from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, several gifts to the Foundation in Venice (some of them recent), as well as loans from private collections. Themes and Variations has included a series of monographic presences of Italian artists: Mirko Basaldella, Bice Lazzari, and most recently Alberto Burri. From July 6, Themes and Variations is dedicating special attention to the art of Agostino Bonalumi.

The focus on Bonalumi’s art is the natural outcome of, firstly, the recent donation of a painting by him (Black, 1966) to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and secondly the installation, in early June, of a room dedicated to the Italian avant-garde with monochrome paintings that have in common the manipulation of the canvas. The section includes works by , , Bonalumi and . Bonalumi was a leading protagonist of the renewal of Italian art in the post-war period of the 1950s and 60s, and of Italy’s claim once more to a position in the international avant-garde. The opening of the 21st century has witnessed a revival of interest in Bonalumi’s work on the part of both specialists and the wider public: this year he has been awarded the Premio del Presidente della Repubblica Italiana 2001. A series of exhibitions in Italy and abroad have affirmed his high reputation.

THE SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION

In addition to the art-environment White Ambience, Space Withheld and Invaded, and to the 1966 painting Black, two other paintings by Bonalumi are on exhibit. Red is an extroflexed canvas of 1975 of the kind that has hallmarked Bonalumi’s career. The technique of extroflexion consists of inserting stretching devices and forms behind the canvas so as to alter and shape its surface. The canvas, no longer a flat field for receiving painted marks, becomes a construction in space with its own vitality bending, arching, protruding and receding in this way enchanting the viewer by seducing the eye. Red – Perturbed Geometry (2002) is a new extroflexed work, never previously exhibited, which like the white ambience, has been created specifically for exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

The presentation of works by Agostino Bonalumi has been made possible thanks to the Galleria d’Arte Niccoli, Parma, and the Galleria Fumagalli, Bergamo.

Banca del Gottardo is Institutional Patron of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection

The programs of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection are made possible by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection Advisory Board, Alitalia, Regione Veneto and: ______INTRAPRESÆ COLLEZIONE GUGGENHEIM Aermec Hausbrandt Andersen Leo Burnett Arclinea Lubiam 1911 Automotive Products Italia Palladio Finanziaria Banca Antoniana Pitti Immagine Popolare Veneta Rex Built-In Barbero 1891 Rubelli Bisazza Salvatore Ferragamo Booz•Allen & Hamilton Italia Swatch Fitt Unipol Assicurazioni Gruppo 3M Italia Wella Hangar Design Group Zucchi - Bassetti Group

#114, June 2002

THE SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION