PAINTING STONE (Works)

Selected Works

Anne Minich

PAINTING STONE
Villa Lontana, Rome, May 25 – July 24, 2021

PAINTING STONE Press Release

PAINTING STONE opens at Villa Lontana on Monday, May 24, 12 – 7pm. The artists invited to be part of this conversation are: Adelaide Cioni, Isabella Ducrot, David Kakabadze, Lucy McKenzie, Anne Minich, Francis Offman, Christopher Page, Delfina Scarpa, Mario Schifano, Jeffrey Stuker, and Vivian Suter.

PAINTING STONE is realized with the support of the Fondazione Santarelli.
Curated by Vittoria Bonifati and Jo Melvin.
The starting point for PAINTING STONE is a series of oil paintings on stone dated between the XVI and XVIII century, a variety of coloured marbles from Imperial Rome and a selection of Paesina stones. The Paesina stone is a variety of Alberese limestone found in Italy’s Northern Apennine area. It is said originally to come from the Florentine hills. It is the most singular example of ‘pictorial stone’ in the limestone family. The specificity of these works on stone bears a close relationship to non-linear ‘histories of painting’. The artworks incorporate the stone’s geological colour and pattern as landscape and/or as background for the painting.

Germano Celant’s seminal essay Framed: Innocence or Gilt, Artforum (summer 1982), proposed painting as an indexical metaphor for how we see and relate to our surroundings. Celant suggests that painting can be thought of as an enormous roll of diversified fabric, woven in a single piece and unrolled in time and in space. This surface extends for miles and miles but never appears on display. Its continuity is interrupted and broken up—cut into—to form innumerable fragments and portions of canvas (paintings), creating intervals and separations, the understanding of which could greatly influence our way of thinking about and seeing painting, or for that matter continuity in the history of art.

PAINTING STONE is curated by Jo Melvin @drjomelvin and Vittoria Bonifati @vittoriabonifati. The exhibition runs until July 24 and is open Wednesday – Saturday, 11am – 7pm

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