For the cycle Sardinia in abstract, the MAN Museum, on the occasion of the Sardinia Literary Festival, “The island of stories”, is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition to the public Testimonials by Rosanna Rossi.
The exhibition will be open during the days of the festival, from 5 to 7 July, from 10:00 to 22:00. Subsequently, the exhibition will be open to visitors, until 1 September 2013, on Saturdays and Sundays from 9.30 to 12.30 and from 15.00 to 18.00, or by appointment.
The project, conceived by the MAN Museum and coordinated by Giovanni Curreli and Enrico Piroddi, together with Giovanni Pisano and Alessandra Pinna, reconstructs Rosanna Rossi’s intense artistic career through a selection of abstract works created between the early 1970s and the present day.
Without a definable focus, Rosanna Rossi’s works present impalpable boundaries, determined exclusively by the physical size of the canvas. Apparently orderly and sequential, the works created since the beginning of the Seventies are actually characterized by accelerations and continuous deviations that transform points into segments and straight lines into wavy paths.
What derives from this is the voluntary emergence of intermediate elements, normally considered secondary: the void between the solids, the pauses of light, the tension between the graphic fields.
Rosanna Rossi was born in Cagliari in 1937, where she still lives and works. After completing his studies at the Zileri Art Institute in Rome, in 1958 he returned to Sardinia where he began to exhibit regularly. He is among the founding artists of “Studio 58”, a free debate group oriented towards the renewal of artistic languages ​​and the promotion of exhibition activity. With the group he exhibited on several occasions, initially presenting works characterized by an expressive figuration altered by material suggestions, in contrast with the folkloristic languages ​​of local painting.
In the following decade, Rosanna Rossi’s research is oriented towards abstraction, interacting naturalistic reminiscences in the use of color and neo-informal connotations of signs. Since then, despite periodic trespassing into the realm of the ready-made, the artist has always maintained a design ambivalence, oscillating between a constructive order of concrete origin and abstract material-expressive solutions, to which he has combined a parallel research in field of assembly, with the use of poor or commonly used materials for the creation of sculptural objects and installations.
The strength of Rosanna Rossi’s work, presented in almost sixty years of activity in prestigious contexts, both in Italy and abroad, is demonstrated by the numerous critical texts dedicated to her by authors such as Gillo Dorfles, Lea Vergine, Marisa Volpi , Tommaso Trini, Enrico Crispolti, Fred Licht, Marcello Venturoli, Maria Luisa Frongia, Mario Ciusa Romagna, Salvatore Naitza, Placido Cherchi and others.
Sardinia in abstract is a cycle created by the MAN Museum dedicated to abstraction in the artistic production of the last fifty years. The cycle includes a series of personal exhibitions by Sardinian-born or resident artists who, since the 1970s – and in some cases even earlier – have developed research in the field of abstraction and who are still active on national circuits today. The exhibition aims to highlight variations and recurrences of the different productions, placing historical works alongside recently created works. The first appointment of the cycle, which was held at the MAN Museum in May and June 2013, was dedicated to Italo Antico (Cagliari, 1934).