Artopia Gallery (via Lazzaro Papi 2, Milan) by Rita Urso opened for its first exhibition on February 2001, with the show In punta di piedi by Marzia Migliora, curated by Emanuela De Cecco. Today, after many years of hectic and tireless activity, the gallery celebrates twenty years of activity with the exhibition inaugurated on 4th of March and that will last until the 30th of April titled I love the gallery – 20th anniversary exhibition.

This is not just an event that has the aim to tell the story of the gallery since the beginning, but it’s also a moment of reflection and an injection of energy in a generalized stasi moment that has infected somehow the world of art. The new vital energy that comes from this new beginning starts in a collateral space, an ex-laboratory from the XIX century in the courtyard of the gallery  that will be the new place of the gallery itself.

During a conversation with Rita Urso, she said: “The new space introduces peculiarities and potentialities that are really different from the first gallery, for example there is a fascinating verticality, and the decision to take this space is due to the need to represent a new programme, the opening to new media that is what interests the gallery most nowadays”.

Already the first space, since the beginning, was really unconventional and revolutionary: it is at the first floor of an ancient building of the early ‘900, near to the home of the owner, it has been set up as a home and not as a museum or an exhibiting space, and the focus of the activity is on emerging artists coming from the oriental and balcanic area. So the space developed since the beginning themes and practices which where not as usual as they are today.

The title of the exhibition for the celebration is inspired by the work I love the gallerists and they love me (2001) by Adrian Paci and this work is put in the space as a beginning and a conclusion of the show. In this work of art Paci with his hands changes positions and faces of the two gallerists Rita and Remo Urso, in order to show metaphorically the transformative power of art on human soul related to the evolution of Artopia Gallery.

The exhibition is divided in three thematic sections which talks about different facets of the story of the gallery: the first two parts deals with the approach to a place that ensemble public space and domestic one, a peculiarity which has always been part of the architecture and choices made in the gallery, in a way that subverts the stereotype of the white cube. In this part it’s possibile to encounter works by Marzia Migliora but also by Paola Gaggiotti and Enzo Umbaca, all works that are conceptually united by the fil rouge of  home and identity.

In the next section there are works of artists those come from the oriental and balcanic area or of artists who are interested in urgent themes of that region, such as Adrian Paci, Maja Bajevic and Phil Collins. The works are site-specific and they are shown for the first time in Italy. The approach of all of them is poetic but also socio-political and it faces the theme of “feeling home” related to the displacement, to divisions among different space-temporal dimensions, in a different but connected dimension that intersects other sections.

In the final section it’s possible to feel the future: cinema, performance, architecture and design, with their dynamism light up this part of the exhibition with works by ZAPRUDER filmmakersgroup, Elizabeth McAlpine and Jean-Baptiste Maitre, artists which are all involved in reflections on time, on relationships between temporalities and filmic or photographic images and on influences that these relations have on a social and narrative level.

I asked to Rita Urso how will the new space be, if she already has an idea of how it will evolve and which are the aims and messages that will be part of this new container. The founder, after a reflection moment said: “I didn’t think to an inaugural exhibition at the moment, also because this space has to be renewed. The exhibition I love the gallery, opened in a rough dimension, was born from the desire to offer a new point of view on the story of the gallery during these twenty years. This show is exhibited in the new space by deliberately avoiding a setting and so it is in a space that “has no skin”, naked and neglected, to underline that the past and the present can look to the future just if it undresses from what’s not necessary. It’s difficult to understand now how the space will evolve, we are in an on-going project. The message that I will like to share with this new location is the overcoming of rigid division among different languages, and more in generale I would like to comunicate that art can change the world thanks to its intrinsic capability to fly high”.

Lucrezia Costa

Info:

4 March – 30 April 2021
RITAURSO Artopiagallery
via L. Papi 2
20135 Millano
info@artopiagallery.net
20th anniversary exhibition
artists: Maja Bajevic | Phil Collins | Martina della Valle | Paola Gaggiotti | Jean-Baptiste Maitre | Elizabeth McAlpine | Marzia Migliora | Margherita Morgantin | Adrian Paci | Jelena Tomašević | Enzo Umbaca | ZAPRUDER filmmakersgroup