00:00 So this is the fourth exhibition of Fabio Maori that Hauser & Wurst is presenting.
00:20 We've worked with the family in the estate of Fabio Maori for about eight years now,
00:26 I believe.
00:27 This is the first show that is not as thematic as the previous one.
00:31 It tends to work in series with a huge body of works around one thematic.
00:37 And this show here is trying to unveil the pop art aspect of his work since Fabio worked
00:46 since 1957 until the time of his death in 2009.
00:52 I encountered the work during Caroline Christophe Bacardi's Documenta 13 in Kassel.
01:01 I was kind of smitten and blown away and we ended up taking him on board at the gallery.
01:11 So this show explores various times, mostly the early work starting in 1957 to about the
01:20 mid-70s, I would say, with all kinds of media and medium from film to painting, silkscreen
01:28 and sculpture.
01:32 And the Maori was a seminal Italian artist who was born in 1926.
01:38 So he was also a generation who of course witnessed the advent of fascism and the war.
01:46 This was very, very traumatizing for him and also became a very important topic in his
01:51 work.
01:53 So a lot of his work deals with ideology, with politics, but also with how media operates
02:01 and how media is used to disseminate ideology.
02:05 In this exhibition, as Olivier mentioned, the focus is really on Maori's populated works.
02:12 So of course the notion of media is very interesting also in the context of pop because media is
02:18 used to disseminate popular culture.
02:22 Some of Maori's most iconic works in the show are his so-called skerni.
02:29 These are screens.
02:33 Maori picks up on the shape and the rounded edges of a TV screen.
02:40 All the cinema screens.
02:42 So here you have two important works.
02:45 The two major works are the early one, this one, which is more like a cinema screen, in
02:50 fact, 1957, and the small one over there, the sculptural painting, which is a screen
02:56 also from 1957, which is really when he starts developing this concept and this idea, which
03:04 he uses throughout his career pretty much.
03:08 Maori's idea in also highlighting the physicality of the screen itself consists in rendering
03:16 the mechanisms of media visible.
03:19 So normally when we look at the screen, we look at the content that is projected onto
03:23 the screen or showed on the screen, right?
03:27 Watching TV, we forget about the TV itself.
03:29 And Maori's doing the precise opposite.
03:31 So he strips the screen bare of any content and narration and shows it in its naked and
03:38 original form.
03:40 Sometimes his screens have the very iconic words, "The end," or in Italian, "fine."
03:52 So with these two works here, Leo Castelli, this is clearly, I guess you could say the
03:58 beginning of the battle.
03:59 It's not really a battle, but it's how you define a part, who's the first, and is that
04:06 really important or not.
04:07 So in 1964, Rauschenberg is awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, while Italians
04:16 such as Fabio Maori or Schifano were already working with the idea of a pop element or
04:25 something very colorful or cartoony or whatever.
04:28 With Maori, it's a natural in a way because he's part of a family of publishers who are
04:32 the first one to invite and to bring Walt Disney to Italy, for instance.
04:36 So he is very close to this world in a way.
04:40 Leo Castelli epitomized the idea of the pop with the artist he represents.
04:44 He's also Italian, as you pointed out before, but he's in America.
04:50 Same thing for Al Capone behind me, which is from Italian descent and a mafioso in Chicago.
04:58 Yeah, so often in this exhibition, there is an emphasis on the relationship between Italy
05:07 and the United States.
05:09 So commonly people associate pop art with the United States, but of course it is a movement
05:13 that was also very strong and extremely interesting in Europe.
05:17 And Maori, not without humor, also hints at this complicated relationship between the
05:23 United States and Europe in this regard.
05:26 Here America is present via two modified US flags.
05:33 Again, the use of vibrant color that we also see in this series titled "Gangster" that
05:39 figures the prominent and very notorious figure of Al Capone.
05:45 And in this section of the exhibition, we turn towards a topic that very much relates
05:51 to Fabio Mauri's screens.
05:53 So as we said before, he really renders the physical component of the screen visible.
06:01 Here he uses the light of the cinematic projection as a material for his sculpture.
06:09 So again, just like the screen that kind of disappears behind the projection, the light
06:14 cone itself is often invisible as we focus on consuming the content itself.
06:19 But Mauri flips these mechanisms and puts the emphasis on the mediatic machinery and
06:26 on how it is constructed.
06:27 So these are really, really stunning and beautiful sculptures.
06:46 So this very, very iconic work is titled "L'intellettuale."
06:50 It's from the mid-1970s.
06:51 And it is both about friendship and about authorship.
06:57 So it is a piece for which Mauri projected Pier Paolo Pasolini's movie "Il Vangelo secondo
07:04 Matteo" onto Pier Paolo Pasolini.
07:07 And the images on the wall testify to that.
07:11 So on the one hand, friendship because Fabio Mauri and Pasolini were very close friends.
07:18 In fact, Mauri was deeply, deeply rooted in a group of intellectuals in Italy at the time
07:23 and was very, very much part of also the cinematic, but the political discourses that were relevant
07:29 at his time.
07:31 And authorship because rather than the author disappearing behind his work, here the work
07:37 itself is projected onto the author.
07:40 And the physicality of the body of the author becomes the surface for the projection of
07:46 the work.
07:49 So this one is, just because it's a very nice object, it's a prototype for actually a public
07:56 sculpture which was never made, but it's a hand torch basically and the light beam is
08:02 solidified as well.
08:04 This is from 1970.
08:09 And it was a work done for an exhibition that Achille Bonito Oliva organized.
08:18 Yeah, so this title of this work, "Amore Mio" as Olivier said, is also the title of our show
08:28 here.
08:29 This is a really seminal work.
08:31 It's an immersive and interactive installation that consists of 18 large silkscreen canvases
08:39 that together form this colorful space that the visitor can navigate by means of light.
08:46 So again, Maori reminds us of the function of light, perspective, and visibility.
08:55 We only see the parts of the work that we actively steer towards and the rest remains
09:01 invisible.
09:03 This work is very interesting to think of in conjunction with the statement by Maori
09:09 that says, in fact, he kind of felt like the entire world is a projection because all of
09:16 us humans are always only able to discern what our sociocultural lens allows us to see.
09:24 So there is always something that will remain in the dark.
09:27 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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