Old Bond Room: Winter Show

5 Feb-22 Mar 2024

Overview

Mazzoleni presents Old Bond Room: Winter Show, an exhibition of works from the Mazzoleni collection. Included within the exhibition will be a selection of works by Carla Accardi (1924 – 2014), Alighiero Boetti (1940 – 1994) and Salvo (1947 – 2015), offering a unique opportunity to view key protagonists of the post-war period in unison.  In discourse with these artists, recent works by Marinella Senatore will also be exhibited. 
 
This year marks the 100th anniversary since the birth of Forma I’s only female founder and member, Carla Accardi, whose calligraphic abstractions offer a unique approach to viewer interaction. Experimenting with a sign-colour artistic language, with material and informal digressions, Accardi communicates Forma I’s primary interest in aligning Marxist political beliefs with a formalist approach to abstraction. In works like Scacchiera verdeoro (1974), Accardi subverts traditional visual writing hierarchies, weaving sinuous lines into a narrative chessboard, that alternates between positive and negative spaces.
 
Alighiero Boetti's exploration of language takes form in his embroidered works known as ‘Arazzi’, conveying puzzles with short phrases, inverted sayings and wordplay. On this occasion, Un pozzo senza fine (1991) embodies his traditional mosaic-like grids of individual letters, deciphered by reading top to bottom, and then left to right. Each letter serves as an autonomous form and through breaking language down into such Boetti exposes both its complexity, but also its artificial arrangement of forms. 
 
Whilst Boetti and Salvo’s careers were closely intertwined throughout the 1960s, by the 1970s Salvo had pivoted away from conceptual work. He began creating hyper-saturated landscapes, blending real and imagined spaces to create simplified compositions, that transport the viewer to a world of the imaginary. This is evident in Una Sera (1993) and Ottobre (1999), which offer an outlet for escapism into a world of simplicity, perfection and vibrancy.
 
These works are presented in unison with Marinella Senatore’s light sculpture We Rise by Lifting Others, which utilises the engaging medium of mercury free neon, with language, to captivate the viewer. Senatore bases her creative practice on the transformative power of social engagement and human relations, with her luminaries and neon work placing participation at their centre. One such luminaria is immortalised in her most recent sketches entitled It’s time to go back to the street (2024). These works depict the large-scale luminaria exhibited in the 2023 Winter Light exhibition at London’s Southbank Centre and capture its power in uniting the centres community.