Anselmo | Laib | Spalletti, 2015

Galleria Lia Rumma is celebrating the launch of Expo Milano 2015 with three large installations by Giovanni Anselmo, Wolfgang Laib and Ettore Spalletti. Lia Rumma has invited the three artists to create site-specific works, which will take up all the floors in the Milan gallery. They will be presented to the public on Sunday 3rd May 2015.

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.

“It is a table with thousands of rice mountains – it is food but not only for this physical body. The black clay pot with white lime dots is from our fields next to my studio in South India. It protects the field and us from all evil. The pod is also used to carry the ashes of the deads which are then given into the rivers”.
“Parole di Colore. 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 running in the distance.”

A sort of religious harmony permeates 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…”

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. . Concerning the screenings of Particolare, Kosuth once asked me why, instead of projecting words, I didn’t just write them directly on the wall: I replied that if I’d written them, I’d have covered that wall and the process would have ended there. But what I intended to do was to make the energy flow continuously, making the creation of the work always active, without taking away anything from what already exists by covering or modifying it.”.