Wednesday 12 October saw the presentation of ‘Oxygen’, the volume dedicated to Alfio Mongelli’s ‘living’ sculpture
On the occasion of the Italy-China Year of Culture and Tourism, on Wednesday 12 October the Società Dante Alighieri hosted the presentation of the volume Oxygen (Hatria Edizioni, 2022), dedicated to the creation of artist Alfio Mongelli, founder and RUFA President.
Inaugurated in 2019, Oxygen is a large mobile steel composition, a ‘living’ sculpture that interacts with the surrounding space, architecture, urban planning and, above all, nature. The work is currently positioned at the entrance to the Wuhan Planning & Design Institute in Wuhan (China), a research centre of excellence for contemporary creativity. As well as wanting to represent the harmony of man with his environment, proposing itself as a symbol of the desire to breathe freely again, it stands at the crossroads of a dual heritage, oriental and western.
The event was held in Rome in Piazza di Firenze. In addition to the artist, Alessandro Masi, secretary general of the Dante Alighieri Society, and the curator Astrid Narguet also spoke. For the occasion, some preparatory sketches of the sculpture were exhibited and a video on the figure and work of the Roman master was presented.
A second home, for artist Alfio Mongelli China is all this and more. In 2007, he exhibited at the Tsinghua University (China), Academy of Art and Design, in the second edition of the international exhibition ‘Art and Science’; In 2008, he was selected among the 20 world-class artists representing Italian Art at the Beijing Olympics, with the creation of the monumental sculpture ‘H2O’; in 2010, he participated in the ‘Sculpture for riverside landscaping belt and the site of world’ at the Shanghai Expo. And in 2014, as part of the ‘International Sculpture’, also in Shanghai, he exhibited ‘O2 – Ossigeno’, a work made of steel that restores the link between art and science that has illuminated the artist’s path through the centuries, in the transition between the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the new millennium.
Nobel Prize winner Rita Levi Montalcini said of him: ‘the physical-mathematical rigour that characterises Alfio Mongelli’s important works is enhanced by the freedom of expression that rejects all scientific schematism. The unity and synthesis achieved in his creations, whether these large sculptures made of stainless steel or expressed in a graphic of geometric shapes, highlight the exceptional personality of the artist among the most representative of Contemporary Art”. And in this becoming, admiring the works of Maestro Alfio Mongelli, founder and president of RUFA – Rome University of Fine Arts, is a beneficial immersion in the contemporaneity that Made in Italy generates.
Listen to the artist’s words
Look at the photos of the event
