Risk the Real

Risk the Real invites us to a journey through the art of the 20th century to find out the meaning of 'making figure' in contemporary art.

The diversity of works in the Museu Coleção Berardo shows us to what extent the artists have turned mimesis – the imitation of reality – against itself through various practices, such as withdrawal, literally or dissimilarity. By embracing an architectural, linguistic, social and political construction, these new purposes of the figure go beyond the customary dualism of the figurative-abstract, realism-idealism.

The exhibition Risk the Real is composed of three parts:

Real spaces: the withdrawal of the figure
The artists working with Minimalism claim for a 'real space': the work must be stripped of any figurative or expressive quality in order to activate in the viewer the full perception of a three-dimensional space. Real space proved to be a veritable utopia against a constantly changing social and political backdrop. The successors to Minimalism do certainly remember to what extent the real can, in art, take advantage of an emergent shape or of the tensions and contradictions of matter in its distinct states.

The figure in acts: the real unlimited
Performance arts have drastically changed the construction of the figure. First of all, they have an impact on the acts of language: artists reveal the power of words – seen here as open forms subject to changes in meaning - to question established realities. On the other hand, decisive pictorial experiences revisit actions, accentuating the exaggeration of gestures, the retreat or grotesque character. Finally, body performances work with the materiality of the body, moulding it into a fertile ground receptive to exploration, delimitation, and the deflagration of discourses and ideological struggles.

The traumatic real: the figure in all its states
Today we recognise that our modern history is constructed not only from real verifiable events, but also from a vertiginous mise en abîme of images multiplied into infinity. Modern artists dare to explore the most encrypted images of our image-based societies to create a visually disturbing experience of reality.
The artistic aim would then be the following: what are the possibilities of representing the subject in an era in which our private and collective bodies are constructed from a bottomless pit of images, infinite reflections of other reproductions?

As part of this exhibition, a whole room is dedicated to Dan Flavin, featuring works loaned by the Panza Collection, a contemporary art collection gathered since the 1950s by Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. Part of this collection – comprised of 133 works of American contemporary art from the 1960s to the 1990s, was donated to FAI (The Italian Fund for Environment) along with the Villa Panza di Biumo, which opened to the public in 2000.