A.B.O. THEATRON. ART OR LIFE

Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli June 25, 2021 - January 09, 2022

Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea presents “A.B.O. THEATRON. Art or Life”, an exhibition dedicated to one of the most important Italian contemporary art historians, critics and curators, Achille Bonito Oliva (Caggiano, 1939). “A.B.O. THEATRON. Art or Life” is part of the overall project Espressioni which investigates the multiple forms of expressivity that cross the history ofart and society seeking an understanding of “Expression” that transcends the Eurocentric canon and any unique artistic movement. Following the exhibition dedicated to Harald Szeemann in 2019, organized in collaboration with the Getty Research Institute of Los Angeles, this exhibition, organized by the CRRI (Castello di Rivoli Research Institute), focuses on Achille Bonito Oliva and constitutes the second chapter of an overall project that Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea and CRRI are dedicating to the most prominent contemporary art curators of the 20th and 21st centuries. Starting from his training and activity in the field of visual poetry in the late 1960s, Bonito Oliva established a relation between some of the most prominent artists of the second half of the 20 th century who contributed to the definition of radical new avenues of research, such as, in the late 1970s, those connected to Italian Transavanguardia internationally referred to as “New Expressionis m” in the 1980s. Bonito Oliva is known for having launched the neo expressionist art movements through his presentation of their work at the ‘Aperto ‘ section of the Venice Biennale in 1980. He late r also directed the overall 1993 edition of the famed Biennale of Venice. With his 1976 book L'ideologia del traditore. Arte, maniera, manierismo (The Ideology of the Traitor: Art, Manner and Mannerism Bonito Oliva analyzed how Mannerism created a p assage from the principle of creation in the Renaissance to that of cita tion, as a response of the artist to the crisis of society the artist lost a sense of centrality and became a lateral figure with respect to science and technology This recalls the figure of the traitor who looks at the world, and does not accept it, who would like to change it but can only act with skepticism without naive optimis m Similarly to the early 1500s, the 1970s where a period of ideological, economic, political and socia l crisis. In European culture, Mannerism developed in the early 1500s, just like the Transavanguardia developed in late 1970s and it was Bonito Oliva himself who made the analogy between Mannerism and the Transavanguardia. Throughout Bonito Oliva's activity, his critical writing s and exhibition contributions, his curatorial flair and intellectual provocations together constitute a unique ly dynamic output characterized by a n ongoing interrelation between word and image, performativity and com munication and by a focus on the increasing intersections between art and life, art and other fields, which Bonito Oliva called “nomadic transversality”.