FRIEZE Masters Seoul 2022 | Hall C, COEX, Seoul | Booth M2
Collectors Preview: 2 September 2022, 2pm – 8pm; 3 and 4 September 11am – 1pm
General Admission: 3-4 September 2022, 1pm – 7.30pm; 5 September 11am – 5pm
BONALUMI | BURRI | DE CHIRICO | FONTANA | MANZONI | MIRÓ | MORANDI | VASARELY
For this first edition of Frieze Seoul, Mazzoleni presents a curated overview of the gallery’s collection featuring important works by Italian and international post-war masters. The project traces a path through the history of 20th-century Italian art, from the avant-gardes, such as metaphysical painting, through post-war movements and the research of the following decades, in a thorough dialogue with the surrealist visions by Joan Miró and Vasarely’s Optical Art masterpieces. Metaphysical characters and mystical still-lives establish an intimate dialogue between Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) and Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), which will be juxtaposed to surrealist figures by Joan Miró. After World War II, Miró started a series of poetic works based on the combined themes of women, birds, and stars, of which Femmes et oiseaux, 1967, is an example. Alberto Burri (1915-1995) is considered one of the most prominent Italian artists of the 20th century. The works Sacco Bianco Nero, 1956, Rosso plastica, 1962, and Nero Cretto, 1978, illustrate the artist’s experimentations with raw materials, such as jute, plastic, and acrovinyl. Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) significantly shaped the successive research on conceptual art. Fontana’s revolutionary practice inspired a younger generation of artists who pushed his experimentations forward. Piero Manzoni (1933-1963) questioned the nature of art itself and its infinite possibilities with his Achrome series, while Agostino Bonalumi (1935-2013) challenged the traditional classification of painting and sculptures with his shaped canvases, activating unprecedented interactions between artwork, space, and observer. These spatial reflections and the use of monochromatic surfaces have been subsequently investigated by other extra-European movements, such as the Dansaekhwa artists in Korea in the 1970s.
A final focus on Optical Art will feature works by the movement’s pioneer Victor Vasarely (1906-1997). The display will present works from the so-called “Black and White” period from the 1950s and 1960s, as well as a few vibrant examples from the 1970s and 1980s, such as Gestalt-chi, 1973, a captivating green-tone oil on canvas that bears witness to the highly kinetic tensions of the artist’s geometric language.