Massimo Bartolini: Hagoromo

“Hagoromo” is the title of what Massimo Bartolini considers to be his first mature work: inside his old studio on a well-illuminated stage, a musician improvises saxophone music. A female dancer reacts to the music, moving inside a parallelepiped on wheels that looks like a tiny home. This performance already anticipates some of the themes and distinctive traits still characterising his current experimental work: a story based around tributes, references, drawings of other stories, artworks and biographies; the relationship with architecture and space; the relationship with theatre and performance art, partly through the use of sound and music; the way the work brings together seemingly irreconcilable opposites.

The exhibition showcases a new installation – the largest Massimo Bartolini has ever created – specifically designed for the The Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art, a sort of new ‘backbone’ guiding onlookers around the works created at different moments in his career. Avoiding the familiar retrospective layout based around a chronological/thematic display of works, the exhibition is like an unexpected sequence of surprising and revealing encounters.