The City Rises

The city has long been a subject of investigation for the modern artist. After the Impressionists, art has been an eminently urban phenomenon. For over a century, cities have provided the most fertile ground for artists: as a table of social interchange, a source of inspiration, a marketplace and a haven. From the Futurists to Léger; from Duchamp’s Bachelor Machines to Ed Ruscha’s maps of Los Angeles; from the photographs by Weegee and Diane Arbus to those by Ara Güler, the urban context has been a territory for investigation, and the privileged vantage point from which to observe the sweeping changes that have affected us in the past 100 years.

"The City Rises" borrowed its name from the seminal painting by Umberto Boccioni (1910) that glorifies the speed, the noise and the excitement of cities at the dawn of the 20th century.

The three artists presented in this exhibition offered the viewer a particular vision of urban life today, distant from the optimism of the Futurist vision, yet equally mesmerizing. Each one, by focusing on the repetition of apparently anodyne actions, lingering on an aesthetical analysis of labor, or confronting the viewer with a non-sentimental and politicized scrutiny of urban centres, presented us with a vision of the city and of the Zeitgeist that is as accurate as it is hyperbolic.

Artists: Fikret Atay, Ali Kazma, Zbig Rybczynsky

Curator: Paolo Colombo