Curated by Carlo Maria Lolli Ghetti
From October 19 to November 15, 2024, Galleria Russo will open the new and exclusive exhibition titled
Berlino abbraccia Berlino, curated by Carlo Maria Lolli Ghetti, dedicated to the thirty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, one of the most important historical and social revolutions to have taken place in Europe.
Amidst the joy of the Berliners, who had been divided for 28 years between East and West, on November 9, 1989, in the brief span of one night, the towers, barbed wire, and concrete blocks—symbols of division and deprivation of freedom that had torn a city and its lives and relationships apart—crumbled under the gaze of the world’s media. To celebrate the anniversary of this incredible revolution, Fabrizio Russo, with his gallery, has opened his space for an intense reflection that, through art, merges opinions that, even if divergent, remain constructive, offering an exhibition/dialogue with 12 of the most interesting contemporary Italian and international artists who present their interpretation of the event.
As the curator Lolli Ghetti states, ‘The request was to reinterpret those events according to one’s own sensitivity and in line with one’s artistic research, so as to broaden the scope of inquiry into a historical event that otherwise risks having a singular and overly simplistic view. The experiment proposed was to give the artists complete freedom, asking each of them to create original works and to provide a brief description of the process that guided them. The ncessary condition was that the visions and processes be free from any curatorial mediation, in order to achieve an amalgamation that is possibly pure and, why not, even divergent. The aim was to create, 35 years later, a stimulus to unlearn what we have learned, pushing us to consider an iconic event like the fall of the Berlin Wall not as a singular, destructive, and isolated event, but as a particularly sharp note in a score that we are still playing.’
On display are 21 works, including sculptures and mixed-media paintings, created by 12 artists from different generations—some of whom simultaneously born at the time of the event—hailing from various parts of the world, as well as from Italy, the United States, Turkey, Albania, and Uruguay:
Daniela Astone (Pisa, 1980), Enrico Benetta (Montebelluna, 1977), Christian Breed (New York, 1981), Manuel Felisi (Milan, 1976), Michael Gambino (New York, 1988), Giovanni Gasparro (Bari, 1983), Ernesto Morales (Montevideo, 1974), Tommaso Ottieri (Naples, 1971), Simafra (Florence, 1985), Giorgio Tentolini (Casalmaggiore, 1978), Emre Yusufi (Istanbul, 1981), and Ilir Zefi (Albania, 1963).
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with contributions from Senator Giulio Terzi di Sant’Agata, an essay by the Ambassador of the Russian Federation to the Italian Republic, Alexey Paramonov, a memoir by the former Secretary-General of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Umberto Vattani, to end with a paper by Carolina de Stefano, Lecturer in European and Russian History at the Luiss Guido Carli University.
