Anselmo, Laib and Spalletti

Galleria Lia Rumma is celebrating the launch of Expo Milano 2015 with three large installations by Giovanni Anselmo, Wolfgang Laib and Ettore Spalletti.

Since the mid-sixties, the German artist Wolfgang Laib has been creating installations of solemn simplicity, with an aesthetic take on the recomposition of organic materials that contain the seed of life and the power of nourishment: milk, pollen, beeswax and rice. The Rice Meals for Another Body, on the ground floor of the space in Via Stilicone, conveys the essence of one of the key themes in his intensely spiritual artistic research: the idea that art plays a redeeming role that considers the body as an indissoluble whole, capable of filling the gap that traditional medicine now ignores.

“Words of colour. I painted the panels one after the other. The colour shifts from sky-blue to grey, touching on dark blue, firing up with purple red and softening in pink, which reverberates with moods on our skin. I imagined colour moving on a single wall racing in the distance.” A sort of religious harmony runs through the work of Ettore Spalletti, whose group of large-format panels, Parole di colore, is on display on the first floor of the gallery. The colour in them is not confined within the frame and is applied in a slow compositional exercise, acquiring decisive importance and a soft, all-encompassing spatial quality of its own.

On the second floor of the gallery,  Giovanni Anselmo will be showing a project that combines two historical works: Oltremare mentre appare verso nord est  “I have used this colour as though it were a material, more like a strip of land or like a compass than a colour in the strictest sense. In Antiquity, ultramarine was brought to Europe from afar – from ultra marinus or ‘beyond the sea’ – from which it takes its name. It points to an elsewhere that is all around us, in every direction. This is because, here on Earth, whichever direction you choose to go in, sooner or later you’ll find yourself beyond the sea. For me, placing this colour on a wall means choosing and pointing in that direction, towards the ultra-marine on the wall and the ultra-marine in the space outside...” and La luce mentre focalizza “…it’s a luminous energy, a constant pulsation of light on a body that I want to pick out, but in a sort of impalpable way.”

until July 18, 2015
Giovanni Anselmo – Wolfgang Laib – Ettore Spalletti
Galleria Lia Rumma
via Stilicone 19, Milano