ARTE FIERA OBSERVATORY
Giovanni Di Brindisi and Stella Massaro have run the AF Gallery in Bologna since 2010.
Re-named AF Gallery in 2018, it focuses on research and experimentation (with specific reference to the ‘90s) and also presents works by more established contemporary artists who are not yet fully appreciated.
Long-term memory is always the most vivid, and so I go back to far-off 1999 and to Anselm Kiefer’s show, curated by Danilo Eccher and one of the most complete ever seen in Italy. I had been in Bologna for just a few years and my first steps in the city’s art scene were mainly to GAM in piazza Costituzione.
A lot of time has passed, and I haven’t found enough iconographic material for a visual reconstruction, so I’ll have to trust my memory and hope it’s reliable. I recall that the show consisted of about 20-30 works: large paintings, lead sculptures, installations and books, and that most of them were created specifically for this event.
What I found striking and demanding about that visit were its clear historical references to 20th-century German vicissitudes, to the settings where horrors occurred, to the memory of myths. I remember the lead airplanes (if I’m not mistaken, they were made with the discarded roof of the Cologne Cathedral), the sunflowers with large books, the pyramids and the figures (unusual images for Kiefer) stretched out under starry skies.
A show of great depth that certainly popularised the work of this great late-20th-century artist not only in Bologna, but throughout Italy.
Anselm Kiefer, Nürnberg, 1982, oil, straw, and mixed media on canvas, The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection