Sette Stagioni dello Spirito

On display at Madre, Gian Maria Tosatti explores the city and the community dimension of civil living and connects the absolute of the ethical element with our historical present.

In his artistic practice, Gian Maria Tosatti, perceives the city as a double, an analogy of the spirit, in which the human being’s inner forms are divided into a concrete composition. While relating to urban space as already experienced in other cities – Rome, New York – in Naples the artist for the first time had the unique opportunity to use the whole city as a potential space of intervention.

In the ideation and creation of the striking project Sette Stagioni dello Spirito (“Seven Seasons of the Spirit”), from 2013 to 2016, Tosatti retraced the course of The Interior Castle (1577), the book in which St. Teresa of Avila divides the human soul into seven chambers, and transfigured them into as many monumental environmental installations.

It is a work with a narrative and theoretical matrix and in progressive formation, aimed at redefining the relations between art and community – between the artwork and the social and anthropological fabric – and conceived as a single great visual and performative novel that, by exploring the city and the community dimension of civil living, connects the absolute of the ethical element with our historical present and the conflicts and lacerations that characterize it.

The exhibition devoted to the project Seven Seasons of the Spirit is the first solo show of the artist in an Italian public museum. It seeks not just to restore the memory of this experience, by embodying it in a unified perspective, but to give it a further dimension: to reconstruct its process behind the scenes, so enabling the public to revisit it in its overall layout while recounting its inner dimension.

until 20 March 2017
Gian Maria Tosatti. Sette Stagioni dello Spirito
curated by Eugenio Viola
Madre
via Settembrini 79, Naples

Sette Stagioni dello Spirito

On display at Madre, Gian Maria Tosatti explores the city and the community dimension of civil living and connects the absolute of the ethical element with our historical present.

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