RENZO BERGAMO
The Aesthetic of Chaos
26 May – 24 June 2017
38 Old Bond Street, London W1S 4QW
“Creativity is an immense black sea where once in a while a light shines”
- Renzo Bergamo.
Brun Fine Art is pleased to present, in collaboration with Associazione Renzo Bergamo per l’Arte e per la Scienza, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Renzo Bergamo (1934-2004) on view at the London gallery from the 26th of May to the 25th of June 2017. This will be the first exhibition in the United-Kingdom dedicated to the celebrated Italian artist. With this exhibition Brun Fine Art celebrates the opening of the new gallery space on the first and second floor of 38 Old Bond Street. The exhibition will include works realised between the 1960s to the final years of the artist’s life, bringing together an important selection of over thirty works from the artist’s oeuvre.
Bergamo features amongst the foundational Italian Abstract Expressionists and Futurists as well as being an important figure in trying to find the relationship between Art and Science. At the beginning of the 1950s, Bergamo met the famous writer Giovanni Comisso, an author whose style was once defined of visual wonders, and whose mentoring and fostering of Bergamo made for a lifelong, almost filial, kin. During this period, Bergamo lived and worked amongst contemporaries like Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Gianni Dova, Emilio Scanavino and Roberto Crippa. In 1965, he went to New York together with other representative artists of the Italian Avant-Garde to hold an exhibition. The soft tone coloured works of this period show an investigation to the cosmos and the concept of abstraction.
In the early ‘70s Bergamo partook with a group of artists and intellectuals to the creation of the artistic movement called "Astrarte”. The ideology of the movement was to create a new poetry comparing it with the new scientific discoveries, both regarding the atom and cosmos. The “Astarte” also attracted acknowledged scientists who were interested in especially the view of Renzo Bergamo on Science. In 1979 and with the support of Milan City Council, Promoter Art publicly supported the launch of this new movement through an exhibition dedicated to the Avant-garde of the 90s, called:"Futurismo, Spazialismo, Astrarte.”
A new period for the fifty-year-old Bergamo started when he moved in 1985 to Sardinia, charmed by what he claimed is the powerful and magical energy of the island, hoping to gain new inspiration. From this point till his death in 2004 he began a new investigative approach, which he called “Cosmic Archaeology”, through which he once again experimented with the syntax of language of new signs as perceived by him within the world of radioactivity.
Bergamo is outside of Italy still an unrecognised genius, however within the Italian art critic circle his work is widely appreciated. This becomes clear from the way critics such as Phillippe Daverio express their thoughts about him: “Renzo Bergamo is the reason why it is possible to imagine a new relationship between the world of science and the world of visual representation of art.” The exhibition Renzo Bergamo: The Aesthetic of Chaos will focus mainly on three characterising periods in his career that shaped the vibrant and exquisite works within his oeuvre shown at Brun Fine Art, in which Art and Science serve as a continuous foundation and inspiration. It covers the works of his early period in which he tries to define the cosmos, the works during the 1970’s where science becomes a more increasing aspect in his oeuvre and finally his last works in which colour and explosion show the maturity of the artist’s career. A published catalogue with the text written by Enrico Gariboldi, who curated a major exhibition on the artist in 1994 in Milan, accompanies the works represented by Brun Fine Art.
Private View: Thursday 25th of May, from 6 to 8 pm.
For any enquiries please contact Giovanni Lacerenza at +44 (0)20 7493 0195 or email to info@brunfineart.com
