On February 7, is opening at the Italian Cultural Institute in London the exhibition ‘Dante ipermoderno. Illustrazioni dantesche nel mondo, 1983-2020′, that will show the public the most recent phases in the long history of illustrations of the ‘Divine Comedy’, through about eighty works created by five contemporary artists: Paolo Barbieri, Monika Beisner, Mimmo Paladino, Tom Phillips and Emiliano Ponzi.
The nine silkscreens by Tom Phillips combine the immediacy of pop art with an evocative, refined, at times even informal, research. The tempera paintings by Monika Beisner, the first female artist to illustrate the whole of the ‘Divine Comedy’, pays attention to detail based on a figurative tradition that dates back to Botticelli. Mimmo Paladino uses drawing, reinterpreted experimentally, to probe the archaic roots of the ‘Divine Comedy’, following a ‘shamanic’ approach. Paolo Barbieri reconciles tradition with innovation: viewers can watch the ‘matite’, the original black sketches, transform into the final colourful prints, with a marked fantasy atmosphere. Emiliano Ponzi, on the other hand, goes totally digital, creating images of surreal tone and with a disturbing vein.
The exhibition is conceived by the Società Dante Alighieri and the Dante Group of the ADI (Italianists’ Association), curated by Giorgio Bacci, Marcello Ciccuto and Alberto Casadei, and is created by Art Media Studio of Florence, thanks to the support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.
The exhibition will be open until 25 March 2022.
For more information, go to iiclondra.esteri.it
