Hugh Marano
The rooms of utopia

Name: Hugh Marano
Start: 2023-03-16 00:00:00
End: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Location: Madre - Donnaregina Museum of Contemporary Art

Madre - Donnaregina Museum of Contemporary Art

Naples, Campania, Italy

The show

The Madre presents Ugo Marano The rooms of utopia , curated by Stefania Zuliani and Antonello Tolve .

The exhibition, also strongly desired by the President of the Campania Region Vincenzo De Luca , offers over forty works, including one – Papà non c'è (1987) – never exhibited outside the Capriglia home-studio: sculptures, installations, drawings , paintings and artist's books from the late 1960s to 2010 give life to a real account of Marano's work, declined through the guidelines that have guided his activity. A path of art and thought that has recognized in utopia its strength and its motive, not structured according to chronological order or on the basis of a selection by techniques and materials, but divided into seven sections, into seven ideas of Home, Body , Time, Art, Writing, Nature, Bond.

Ugo Marano's work bears witness to a close link with nature, the very matrix of his artistic action, whose metamorphic energy is not represented as it is, but translated and restored in its vitality. There isn't a privileged technique for this translation of energy, for putting into concept and therefore for putting into shape the continuous natural metamorphosis. For example, in 1969 Marano chose ceramics (the queen art) to recreate the unstable horizon of the sea, giving life to the first anti-floor, and many times over the years he has continued to entrust his marine story to ceramics: the musical sequence of Waves (1981) shown here is clear proof of this.

The pottery also bears witness to the artist's relationship with the territory and with some elements of its tradition: recurring, in fact, are works that refer to the experience of the Potters of Cetara and Rufoli, a land of fine clays where the firing of terracotta is a art is a collective ritual, as told by the Creative City Museum of Ogliara which had its inspiration precisely in Marano. On display are some works that refer to his research conducted on the vase, part of a much larger series that the artist created in the early 2000s.

Another recurring element, easily recognizable in the exhibition itinerary, is the chair, emblem of a vision of art that does not tend to obtain an easy result but to continuously develop new strategies of life and thought: and after all «the accounts with the ideas are made from an uncomfortable chair. Armchairs make ideas soft: it is the deception of the armchair».