80/90. Art in Sardinia And the second stage of the MAN’s three-year programme “ There resistance constant”, dedicated to the study of the most innovative research which, starting from the end of the 1950s, has characterized the regional artistic scene.
One year after the first event dedicated to the period 1957-1983, the “80-90” exhibition, edited by Antonella Camarda and Rita Pamela Ladogana , proposes a comparison with the complexity of the Sardinian cultural field through a polyphonic vision of the visual art of the last twenty years of the twentieth century.
The project aims to describe events and experiences developed on the island territory, in order to propose an overall vision of the artistic fabric and the critics who supported its development. A relationship of which not only works of art remain but also a rich documentary corpus – composed of press reviews, films and above all invitations, catalogues, posters and posters – proposed again on this occasion within the exhibition itinerary.
Two decades characterized in equal measure by continuity and change , in which coherence and experimentation coexist in a complex scene which, once the ideological tensions of the Seventies have disappeared, sees the consolidation of individual itineraries and the emergence of new protagonists.
Although the discussion on identity is certainly not foreign to artists working in Sardinia – who in some cases carry out craft design projects that rethink the experiences of the ISOLA (Istituto Sardo Lavoro Artigiano) – rather than a claim for local specificities in a collective sense , the ones that prevail are determination needs of the individual self, to promote one’s personal research outside of adhering to specific currents.
The tension towards one existential dimension moreover, it is in line with the general context of the 1980s: the age of feelings and private life, of quotation and the media, of the end of ideology, of experimentation, sometimes ephemeral, with new languages, new materials and the beginnings of the revolution digital. Between echoes of the Transavantgarde and a massif return to painting , declined in neo-expressionist experiments or formal research that points to the geometric and the abstract, the first evidence of participatory, performative and video art .
In the nineties, if the closure of the Duchamp Gallery in Cagliari and the Chironi 88 Gallery in Nuoro – driving centers for the contemporary on the island – showed the vulnerability of the art system in Sardinia, old and new generations of artists and critics find different spaces and new impulses, also thanks to the support of a part of the political class that promotes acquisition policies and events dedicated to the local art scene.
It is no longer possible to identify labels or groupings, a fragmented picture dominates where variants prevail over constants and diversity over affinities. They become important autobiographical research , the dialogue between otherness and identity, the increasingly in-depth investigation of relationship with space and the practices related to the use of the body , declined in different directions.
The exhibition journey ends with the end of the millennium , ideally marked by the exhibition Atlas. Geography and History of Young Italian Art, cured in 1999 in Sassari by Giuliana Altea and Marco Magnani, in which the discussion of cultural geographies is rethought from new perspectives, carrying forward a group of emerging artists different in terms of training, languages and requests, but united by an experimental attitude and intolerance for the limits – mental and physical – of the island. In the same year in Nuoro, the MAN Museum opened to the public, soon to establish itself as the main center for contemporary art in Sardinia.
Artists on display: Italo Antico, Gianni Atzeni, Leonardo Boscani, Gaetano Brundu, Zaza Calzia, Giovanni Campus, Giovanni Carta, Francesco Casu, Tonino Casula, Erik Chevalier, Aldo Contini, Enrico Corte, Pietro Costa, Attilio della Maria, Antonello Dessì, Paola Dessy, Nino Dore, Angelino Fiori, Greta Frau, Gino Frogheri, Salvatore Garau, Gianni Nieddu, Giorgio Urgeghe, Maria Lai, Ermanno Leinardi, Angelo Liberati, Gabriella Locci, Lalla Lussu, Antonio Mallus, Pinuccia Marras, Luigi Mazzarelli, Italo Medda, Mirella Mibelli, Marco Moretti, Wanda Nazzari, Costantino Nivola, Andrea Nurcis, Antonello Ottonello, Primo Pantoli, Igino Panzino, Pastorello, Bruno Petretto, Roberto Puzzu, Rosanna Rossi, Anna Saba, Giulia Sale, Graziano Salerno, Giovanna Salis, Josephine Sassu, Giovanna Secchi, Danilo Sini, Pietro Siotto, Aldo Tilocca, Y Liver.
Antonella Camarda she is a researcher in History of Contemporary Art at the University of Sassari and since 2015 director of the Nivola Museum in Orani.
Pamela Ladogana she is a researcher in History of Contemporary Art at the University of Cagliari and part of the management committee of Medea, an international journal of intercultural studies.