On Saturday 17 May 2014, Studio la Città will be opening De Rerum Natura, a group show curated by Angela Madesani in collaboration with Andrea Lerda. The exhibition aims at exploring the complex relationship between contemporary art and nature by following various possibilities: naturans nature as the subject and object of art through its direct presentation; nature as an entity bearing a secular sacredness; and, finally, ethical and ecological nature.
De Rerum Natura is a deep meditation, by a selected group of Italian and international artists from various generations, which goes far beyond a simple landscape exhibition; the artists also inevitably go beyond the vision enshrined in the Land Art of the 1960s and 1970s.
In the show are some fifteen artists who use different languages (from installations to photography, video, and design). They inquire into certain themes linked to the humanity-environment-nature relationship: from simple observations of the surroundings to the conferring of sacredness on nature, and from nature’s physical presence, a synonym of beauty and purity, to the devastating reality of environmental problems. All this as part of a context, that of today, in which nature is an everyday subject of discussion, study, and news.
And so, as happened from the 1960s onwards with the increase at an international level of the debate about ecology, in this case too art and design become the starting point for a series of thoughts that will lead to the formulation of questions, though without any certainty of firm and definite answers.
Besides the view of the figurative arts, from sculpture to photography and video, the show will also provide the visitor with the point of view of design.
The show’s title comes from the distant past: it is the title that, in the first century AD, the Latin poet Lucretius gave to his epic-didactic poem about nature. This was not a casual choice: if the work by Lucretius was a call to personal responsibility, an invitation to an awareness of the many-sided reality of our surroundings and of their problems, here we are in a very similar position, one in which art ought to, and could be a useful warning to humanity to position itself in its vital context in a different way.
