False Marble and Glowing Stars: Carrara with Gastini, Spagnulo, Zorio.
26 September 2025 to 26 June 2026
Kunstmuseum Reutlingen | konkret
Curator: Holger Kube Ventura
The poetic group exhibition False Marble and Glowing Stars presents some forty works by four artists from Northern Italy who appeal to both feelings and the intellect, mediating between perception and concept. The artists combine discursive and intuitive methods, uniting emotional and rational approaches. The exhibition juxtaposes works from the 1970s by three renowned artists of a similar generation—some of whom are associated with Arte Povera—with a selection of works by a much younger artist whose oeuvre is developing in the twenty-first century. This allows past trends to be compared with its further developments in the present. In keeping with its program, the Kunstmuseum Reutlingen | konkret once again proposes rethinking the supposedly historical term “Concrete Art” on the basis of neighboring positions.
The art of Linda Carrara (b. 1984) reflects the mimetic dynamics of painting, and her works always seek to evoke an immersive experience. Many of her creations are direct imprints of nature, by which its “material” can be experienced firsthand. Frottages of tree bark, forest floors, and sandy pond bottoms create an “all-over” of “the world” and at the same time have very concrete physical counterparts. While Carrara’s Esami di realtà (Reality Tests) actually allow glimpses into the interior of seen landscapes through axis reflection of the painting material, works from the Sulla superficie (On the Surface) series create landscapes without scale from streaks of different liquids: They could be microscopically small or infinitely large. Similarly, the trompe l’œil works in the Falscher Marmor (False Marble) series are not concerned with the visual appearance of this natural stone, but rather with complex mental images that can be permeated by both cultural codes and subjective longings. Thus, all of Carrara’s works reveal, or rather embody, latent realities. What can be seen in them always challenges the cognitive value of “reality.” The membrane of nature—the layer between its inner essence and its outer form—has been transformed by the artist into painterly gestures and traces to achieve a deeper understanding of reality.
The other three artists—Marco Gastini (1938–2018), Giuseppe Spagnulo (1936–2016), and Gilberto Zorio (b. 1944)—are from an older generation. They all worked in Milan and Turin around the same time, and they were all influenced by the political and cultural upheavals in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s. Following the revolt against institutions, euphoria about progress, and optimism about technology, a multifaceted search for a new place for the individual emerged. The lost unity of body and mind, passion and intellect, culture and nature was to be restored. As Ingrid Rein noted, this seemed impossible within the framework of existing artistic styles, techniques, and means. Therefore, materials came into use which seemed elementary as they were hardly marked by high culture: Earth, iron, wood, cardboard, glass, lead, wax, water, sand, and ash became “embodiments of spiritual-sensual, but not programmatically defined, connections.” Artists incorporated “reality” in the form of quotations from nature and culture directly into their works, often entrusting themselves—as Germano Celant, who coined the term Arte Povera, described it—to “those dream and myth structures of Italian and European culture that run independently of technological and industrial requirements.” Most of the works presented here, all of which are from the museum’s holdings, were created between 1967 and 1980, a period that witnessed the gradual replacement of the term Arte Povera by the subsequent Transavanguardia.
“Tension,” like “energy,” was a term Marco Gastini often used to describe his artistic concerns. To him, drawing and painting were always vehicles for pushing pictorial surfaces into the surrounding space and charging them with energy. His serial works in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Reutlingen | konkret, and in particular the monumental wall installation 42.12 m² di pittura (42.12 m2 of Painting), which is made of thrown lumps of lead, demonstrate his conceptually reflective approach to action painting and his interest in creating unstable spaces. These and other all-over works by Gastini appear to be excerpts from something on a global scale, as if viewed through a microscope or telescope.
During one of his most important creative phases, Giuseppe Spagnulo—who came from a background in constructivist sculpture and concrete plastic art—addressed universal human themes, such as the longing for lost contact with nature. His artistic exploration of the cultural roots of humanity led him to ancient mythology. For example, his multi-part magnum opus, Le armi di Achille (The Weapons of Achilles) evokes the archaic world of Homer and visually expresses the tragic, Apollonian-Dionysian nature of humanity. Man created a spear, shield, and armor out of terracotta and iron with his hands, while the conflict between creative forces is manifested by ash and sand covering the contours of geometric forms.
In Gilberto Zorio’s art, “energy” is a key concept in terms of physical-chemical as well as emotional and rational processes. Whenever moments of action, change, movement, acceleration, inhibition, or destruction can be read in his works, they are meant as manifestations of energy. Since 1972, the artist’s oeuvre has revolved around the pentagram, which has stood for millennia as a magical symbol of universality, wholeness, and endlessness. In Stella incandescente (Glowing Star), its shape is formed from a glowing wire, making this installation not only energetic in the truest sense of the word, but also dangerous—all the more so as it also points a spear at its viewers, the first weapon used by humans that was capable of overcoming distance.
The assemblage of works by these four artists creates a kaleidoscopic neighborhood along the themes of nature, energy, myth, and mimesis. In each case, the artistic gesture, the expressive potential of the material itself, and elementary experiences (with earth, water, air, fire, time, and space) play a tangible role. The title, False Marble and Glowing Stars, serves as a cipher for this concept. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Linda Carrara for her passionate commitment during the preparation of this extensive project. I would also like to thank my colleague, Jolanda Bozzetti, for her contribution to this volume and for supporting the exhibition in so many ways. The exhibition could not have been realized without the dedicated cooperation of all my other colleagues at the Kunstmuseum Reutlingen.