November 22nd 2024 - March 1st 2025

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Osart Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Monochromatic Light: Reloaded, a group show that brings together works by artists Anne Appleby, Lawrence Carroll, Timothy Litzmann, Winston Roeth, David Simpson, Phil Sims and Ettore Spalletti, and marks the gallery's second major collaboration with the Panza Collection. The idea for the exhibition stems from the intent to gather the artists that Giuseppe Panza di Biumo selected in 2001 when, requested by the Soprintendenza dei Beni Culturali of Modena and Reggio Emilia, he was asked to fill the empty frames in the Appartamento Stuccato of the Ducal Palace in Sassuolo. The works, commissioned by Panza and made specifically to fit in those spaces, were then donated to the Ducal Palace where they are now on permanent display.

 

As for previous cases (Museo Reina Sofia, Musée de la Ville de Paris, Museum Saint-Pierre in Lyon, Palazzo Ducale in Gubbio), the curiosity of the visionary Milanese collector was not disappointed by the request of creating a dialogue between contemporary artists - whose practice is almost exclusively focused onto the dynamics of light and color - and a space that belongs to a distant historical era both in terms of time and aesthetic as well as architectural taste, nevertheless succeeding in achieving an unexpected yet harmonious coexistence. Panza’s selected artists share a common love for the chromatic research, and each of them applies a maieutic approach to the space they are assigned, as the collector’s words well explain: ‘[…] It was necessary for each artist to see their assigned room and understand the dominating atmosphere […]’.

 

This successful experiment has thus achieved not only the practical aim to fill in the voids left in the niches of the apartment, which were originally occupied by now-dispersed works by Great Masters such as Guercino, Salvator Rosa, and Jean Boulanger, but also to realize an ideal consistency with the two dominant colors in the rooms, the gold and white of the stucco (‘[…] the incorruptible metal, symbol of the purity of the soul, and the whiteness of milk, a vital food […]’). Such shades in fact live on light and enhance the ultimate goal of these artists’ research.

 

Simpson’s iridescent form-color, Spalletti’s blurry gilded blues, Sims’ chromatic consistency, the ability to absorb light of Roeth’s canvases, Litzmann’s murky yet transparent colors, the chromatic suprematism of Appleby’s palette, as well as Carroll’s surfaces/volumes: once again the famous collector and patron has succeeded in subverting the rules regulating the relationship between the ancient and the contemporary, tuning out their seeming dissonances and overthrowing all resistance, without fearing the legacy of the past.

 

Similarly, the desire to bring back together the works of these seven artists in the neutral spaces, by definition, of the gallery stems from the need to readjust the viewers’ look that - as Giuseppe Panza well knew - never ceases to adapt to the Zeitgeist and to face changes. The works, selected with the Panza Collection, tell unique stories of material but above all spiritual experimentation, and offer endless ways to interpretation that cross as many facets of sensibility.