Sergio Lombardo
Dai Quadri ai Superquadri
1961-1966
1/9unosunove is delighted to announce the opening of Sergio Lombardo (Rome, 1939) exhibition, “Dai Quadri ai Superquadri. 1961–1966”.This new exhibition project intends to narrate a period of crucial importance in the artist’s career, picking up from where the first monographic exhibition dedicated to him in the Gallery venue in 2016 left off, which analyzed the production of his Monocromi between 1958 and 1961.
In the first half of the 1960s, though in his early twenties, Sergio Lombardo was already one of the protagonists of the Roman and national art scene. The Italian capital found itself at an important crossroads of international artistic experience, and Lombardo sensed that the European avant-garde could find one of its outposts in Rome. In the group of Piazza del Popolo artists to which he belonged, he recognized the fundamental premises for a revolution in the language of painting, and became its spokesman and advocate. This reflection—on which a detailed analysis can be found in the interview with the Artist by Francesca Pola —led Lombardo to make a radical choice: to abandon contemplative painting in order to enter the even more extraordinary participatory potential of “super-painting”, in what would soon become the substratum of a genuinely avant-garde theory: Eventualism.
The exhibition brings together a major selection of works on canvas from the series of Gesti Tipici and Uomini Politici Colorati (1961–1964), and then focuses on the two-year period 1965–1966, with various experimental projects on paper (such as those relating to the Strisce Extra) and, above all, the Superquadri, of which both the projects on paper and the three-dimensional creations are presented. The exhibition closes with the Punti Extra of 1966, which already foreshadow the new and radical environmental installations which Lombardo was to devote himself to up until the early 1970s.
The exhibition will be on view until Saturday, September 25, 2021