The MAN Museum is pleased to announce the inauguration of the exhibition “Ipotesi”, by Italo Antico.
Born in Cagliari in 1934, after a childhood spent between Trieste, Cagliari and Naples and after some youthful experiences as a cabin boy and long-term captain on the routes to the Americas and the Orient, Italo Antico came to sculpture around the mid-1960s and since then he has devoted himself predominantly to this, together with other activities such as painting, carpet design, ceramics and jewellery.
Long-time resident in Milan, where he has exhibited regularly since the mid-1970s, Antico is the author of works in stainless steel, with an abstract-structuralist approach, which develop the themes of the line and the set of lines as modulation tools of space. Inclined or angled lines which, over time, have increasingly taken on an environmental value, occupying architectural spaces, both indoors and outdoors, of which, through changing solutions, they seem to want to overcome the limits.
One of the most original Sardinian artists of his generation, for the MAN Italo Antico Museum he conceived an exhibition project that includes six works, of which five created between the mid-seventies and the end of the following decade – among the most significant of his career sculptural – and one created for this occasion.
The five works from the Seventies and Eighties exemplify the artist’s thought, his approach to sculptural construction, his attempt, reiterated over time, to conquer space through the sign. Works, as Gillo Dorfles wrote already in 1976, which undermine the idea of plastic mass, which deny any principle of monumentality to open up to a vision of the world “in which sculpture increasingly takes on the function of personalizer of an environment, of index inserted within a context”.
The recent work, “Vita Sospesa”, the fulcrum of the entire exhibition project, is the last of a cycle dedicated to his son Angelo, who died prematurely a year ago. The sculpture, composed of a bundle of steel rods , typical of Italo Antico’s production, rests on a base of books that belonged to the son and is covered with a wet white cloth from which the folds of the auctions can be seen. To be treated, with the delicacy and lightness of which Antico, like few others, is capable, are the themes of memory, transparency and abandonment, evoked here both in the way of treating the materials and in the forms created.
Conceived as an opportunity to reread the artist’s work and at the same time as a look, however limited, at his activity today, which is more intense and full of ideas than ever before, Italo Antico’s exhibition at the MAN Museum opens a cycle of events dedicated to abstraction in Sardinian artistic production of the last fifty years.
