UGO LA PIETRA / ADOLFO NATALINI - IN DIALOGUE

18 January 2020 - 28 March 2020

Exhibitions

UGO LA PIETRA / ADOLFO NATALINI - IN DIALOGUE

Bologna

Curated by Matteo Giacomelli The exhibition IN DIALOGUE at Spazio e Immagini gallery in Bologna presents, through a series of works by Ugo La Pietra and Adolfo Natalini, an ideal meeting between the two architects that originated in the years of Radical Architecture and has never stopped. Guidelines for this conversation between friends are the themes of travel, memory and drawing as the fundamental dimensions of architecture and design. Ugo La Pietra presents a series of photomontages, privileged form of design analysis between photography and text, used by the artist-architect since the 1960s and 1970s. Among them we mention Viaggio a New York (1972) on the occasion of the exhibition at MoMa, Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, or the photomontage related to the research on Cultura Balneare (1988) done in the town of Cattolica. In the notebook Viaggio nel Mediterraneo (1992) La Pietra deals with the history of peoples and the Mediterranean through a narration drawn and written page by page. Adolfo Natalini presents two historical works from the era of Superstudio in the form of drawing and collage. The first is Monumento Continuo Niagara Falls (1971-'73) and the second is Città Istogrammi sul Mare (1971). Natalini then re-reads some significant stages of his professional and human journey in which the xerox prints are enlivened by colour as in Sala Michelangelo of the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in Florence or in the Sala Botticelli of the Uffizi (2004). A large-format tempera brings us back to Superstudio's members embellished by chromatic explosions where what memory has lost in definition is recovered in terms of poetry, Superstudio e l’Architettura Nascosta (1975-2015). In this exhibition both Ugo La Pietra and Adolfo Natalini demonstrate a passion for architecture and man that we could define as a humanistic background capable of awakening us from the obvious and the conformism that surround us. Ugo La Pietra- biography Born in Bussi sul Tirino (Pescara) in 1938, he lives and works in Milan. A trained architect, artist, film-maker, editor, musician, cartoonist and teacher, in 1960 he started defining himself as a researcher in the communication and visual art system while at the same time venturing into the worlds of art and design. His works are featured in the permanent collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), FRAC d’Orleans, MoMA (New York), SF MOMA (San Francisco), Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library (Yale University) and so on. Adolfo Natalini - biography Born in Pistoia in 1941, he graduated in architecture in Florence and founded the Superstudio, initiato of the so-called "radical architecture". Superstudio's projects have appeared in publications and exhibitions all over the world and his works are now part of the collections of museums such as the MoMa (new York), Centre George Pompidou (Paris), Maxxi (Rome). In Holland he was the initiator of a movement defined as "contemporary traditionalism". Full professor at the Faculty of Architecture of Florence, honorary member of the Bund Deutscher Architekten and of the American Institute of Architects.