Despite the scorching temperatures reached in recent weeks, Rome still offers us its five must-see exhibitions: contemporary art, architecture, and even “saved art.”
Here are what they are and where you can go to visit them.
Appriou Art Club #35 at Villa Medici until September 4, 2022
Villa Medici hosts the exhibition Appriou Art Club #35 until September 4, 2022.
The French artist, Jean-Marie Appriou, uses materials such as aluminum, bronze, glass, clay, and wax to represent fantastical worlds inhabited by human, animal, or plant figures.
What Jean-Marie creates is a universe populated by horses, snakes, grasshoppers, sharks, and seahorses.
It is precisely the transition between different natural elements, from aquatic to aerial, from underground to terrestrial that represents one of the central themes of Appriou’s work, set within the context of Villa Medici, which with its gardens and hidden corners is the perfect place to “plant” the artworks all around.
In Appriou Art Club #35, visitors are invited to take a walk along the exhibition path that connects the loggias of Balthus and Cleopatra, the sculptural group of the Niobids, the Gipsoteca, and the Room of Birds, former private studio of Ferdinando de’ Medici.
10 Journeys in Italian Architecture at Palazzo Altemps until September 4, 2022
The National Roman Museum – Palazzo Altemps in Rome hosts until September 4, 2022 the exhibition 10 Journeys in Italian Architecture featuring a selection of 110 images by young photographers along ten itineraries that traverse our peninsula and narrate the variety of its contemporary architectural heritage.
10 Journeys in Italian Architecture is set up in the central courtyard of Palazzo Altemps: it presents 110 medium and large format prints on a relief map of the Peninsula, allowing visitors to retrace the itineraries mapped out by the photographers across Italian territory.
The photographs are added to the platform Atlante Architettura Contemporanea, created in 2018 by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity to enhance the contents of the National Census of Second Half of the 20th Century Architecture and to tell the story of Italy through the original perspective of architecture photographers.
Among the exhibited photographers are Roberto Boccaccino, Marina Caneve, Davide Cossu, Louis De Belle, Luca Girardini, and Marco Zorzanello, Paolo Lindozzi, Allegra Martin, Simone Mizzotti, Flavia Rossi, Alberto Sinigaglia who have produced a corpus of nearly 3000 photographs documenting over 250 architectures, from the recognized masterpieces to the most surprising and lesser-known buildings.
Chiara Bettazzi Surplace at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art until September 4, 2022
The National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art inaugurates the exhibition Surplace which presents for the first time in a unique and unprecedented installation the most recent photographic works of Chiara Bettazzi.
The 36 photographic works on display come from the series Still Life (2020), A tutti gli effetti (2021), Aste (2021) and Equilibri precari. Elevazioni (2022), all sharing a common point of origin with the artist’s installation practice, represented by large, heterogeneous plastic agglomerates of objects and fragments of cherished items that carry with them the memory and layers of lived experience.
Surplace – which from its title evokes a certain idea of immobility, interruption, suspension – subverts the internal logic of the individual photographic series and presents them as a constellation that expands in the space of the Galleria Nazionale and requires the viewer to “arm” their gaze, so that what seems to be a single multitude can reveal itself in its infinite variations.
The shift in perspective marks the root of the entire exhibition project. While the photos from the Still Life cycle relate to an idea of still life, those from “A tutti gli effetti” reveal the provisionality of a set waiting to be framed. In the Aste cycle, the photographs transform into vague “surrealist” trophies, suspended in nothingness and decontextualized, now far from the original pictorial genre, while Equilibri precari. Elevazioni reintroduces the presence of the artist, highlighting the performative element inherent in every still life, where the objects are carefully arranged by the artist according to precise compositional rules.
The combinatorial art of Bettazzi materializes in a new and always provisional type of still life that brushes against the genre each time, alluding to it but never truly embodying it.
Han Yuchen. Tibet, Splendor and Purity at Palazzo Bonaparte until September 4, 2022
At Palazzo Bonaparte there is Han Yuchen, with the exhibition Han Yuchen. Tibet, Splendor and Purity
The exhibition is a narrative by the master of oil painting of contemporary China about Tibet, its people, its landscapes, and its soul. A country defined as the “Roof of the World” and depicted in a gallery of portraits of those who live on that immense plateau.
The exhibition Han Yuchen. Tibet, Splendor and Purity brings together 40 works divided into three sections: Landscapes, Portraits, and Spirituality. The exhibition is a tribute to the deep moral and spiritual bond that unites Tibet and Han Yuchen.
The artist, strongly connected to the traditional values of his culture, also draws inspiration from the 19th-century art of which he is a great enthusiast. He has indeed founded a museum in the city of Handan with works by Millet, Corot, and Goya, just to name a few.
Among these, Millet in particular is a source of inspiration for the painting of Han Yuchen who, in the same way, has made clear and poetic painting his distinctive trait. HAN YUCHEN. Tibet, Splendor and Purity is produced and organized by Arthemisia in collaboration with Segni d’arte, and is curated by Nicolina Bianchi and Gabriele Simongini, with a catalog by Skira.
Art Museum at the Diocletian Baths until October 15, 2022
The Art Museum Saved will be located within the National Roman Museum – Diocletian Baths in the Aula Ottagonale, until October 15, 2022.
As can be easily inferred from its name, the museum was created with the intention of bringing together all those works recovered and literally “saved” by the Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage (TPC).
These are goods that have been stolen, dispersed, sold, or illegally exported and then, finally, brought back home, to stitch together that piece stolen from history and the national heritage.
The works displayed here will remain for the necessary time before returning to their respective museums.
The exhibition features items that the Operational Department TPC has repatriated from the United States since December 2021. These are artifacts stemming from various investigative activities conducted by the “Carabinieri dell’Arte” in collaboration with U.S. authorities, seized from museum directors, auction houses, and private collections in various locations across the ocean. They had undergone the usual procedures of illicit trafficking in the sector: clandestine excavations, receiving stolen goods, illegal exportation. The return to Italy took place on December 15, 2021, at the Consulate General in New York, where some pieces remained on display for a few months.
