The volume accompanies the retrospective exhibition devoted to the forty-year career of the artist from Romagna hosted by the Fondazione Pino Pascali at Polignano a Mare from 18 May to 22 September 2024.
“Marco Neri’s research,” observes the critic Roberto Lacarbonara in his text together with the critical contribution by Davide Ferri, “have always placed the gaze at the centre of his work. In it the relationship that incorporates the world into painting, the transubstantiation of reality into image, is consummated. The motif of landscape, in particular, is entrusted with a threshold function, the status of proximity between people and the environment, the condition of every pictorial inhabitation. In other words, the landscape is the trigger; it is an expedient: the artist’s primary interest is of a linguistic nature: how to utter the landscape? Or, before that, how to look, how to perceive? Through what historical and cultural equipment is this mediation (abstraction?) that a painting always entails achieved?”
After graduating from the Istituto d’Arte in Forlì and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna in 1992, Marco Neri (1968) made his debut among the young Italian artists of Indagine ’87 at Palazzo Re Enzo, Bologna, while the following year he was among the winners of the “Premio F.P. Michetti” in Francavilla al Mare (1988). Subsequently he took part in numerous exhibitions in Italy and abroad. In 2001 he held a double solo exhibition (with Andrea Salvino) at the Spazio Aperto of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Bologna and in the same year, on the invitation of Harald Szeemann, he participated in the 49th Edition of the Venice Biennale “Platea dell’Umanità”. Since 2001 he has combined his artistic activity with that of a teacher of painting, first at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Ravenna, then in Foggia, and since 2019 in Lecce, where he lives.
Volume in Italian and English, translation by Scriptum, Rome.
€ 32,00