The Ettore Fico Museum and Thomas Brambilla Gallery are pleased to present the first anthological exhibition of American artist John Torreano.
The exhibition presents a selection of works that best represent his long career, starting from the Sixties until today. It includes 40 works including paintings and sculptures that best represent Torreano’s long career from the Sixties to now. Torreano's works are the result of a long research to overcome the modernist dogma of essentialism and the theory of work as a "container" of meanings.
In the seventies, the elaboration of the Big Bang theory was crucial for Torreano. It described the Universe as a form of expanding space, consisting of a series of "objects”, such as stars, planets, galaxies and black holes etc. These astronomical elements are always recalled by the copious decoration that adorns each of Torreano’s paintings. His works are covered with a variety of unusual materials (acrylic gems, crystal gems and wooden spheres) and they emphasize a unique experience for the observer.
As the viewer moves, in relation to the paintings, the gems allow us to have a variety of different points of view. Thus, eliminating the hierarchal and academic point of view, each spectator becomes the author himself. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog raisonné containing critical essays by Andrea Busto and Terrie Sultan, ex-director of the Parrish Museum for more than 20 years.
The interesting point that emerges from the curatorial texts is the correspondence between Torreano’s practice and his long-time friend Richard Artschwager, and, above all, his active role in the New York cultural scene with artists such as Ron Gorchov, Elizabeth Murray and Bill Jensen.
John Torreano (b.1941, Flint, MI) has exhibited his works extensively since the late 1960s including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C, the Indianapolis Museum of Fine Arts and many others.
