Una mostra di Maria Pina Bentivenga e Mei Chen Tseng.
Istituto centrale per la grafica, Palazzo della Calcografia
Via della Stamperia, 6 – Roma
Opening: Thursday, 23 March 2023 at 6 pm
Open to the public: 24 March – 30 April 2023
From 23 March 2023, the Central Institute for Graphics will host the exhibition Immediati dintorni, curated by Michela Becchis and Gabriella Bocconi, featuring the engravings of Maria Pina Bentivenga and Mei Chen Tseng. The exhibition, realised thanks to a memorandum of understanding between the Central Institute for Graphics and the Representative Office of Taipei in Italy – Cultural Division, aims to advance cooperation and cultural exchange between Taiwan and Italy by comparing two artists whose chosen technique is engraving.
The two artists focus their research on the meaning of the landscape, a landscape that abandons the mimetic aspect to investigate its more cultic and metaphorical, almost sacred meaning that this represents for both of them, both in their research and in their cultures. An exchange that, despite apparently distant cultures and different engraving techniques, seems to weave a multiplicity of ideas and creation that determines a common feeling.
Cultures that look at each other and meet, that find themselves within mutual recognition and mutual appreciation. In the words of the curator Michela Becchis: The two embrace, one through concrete cultural and spiritual proximity, the other through reflection, careful technical care, that dense parallel of time and space that in the Eastern world was established between writing and engraving. Enclosed in the path inscribed in the ideograms that make up the word is the commitment of gesture, of forming each individual character in an aesthetically perceptible way.
The exhibition presents 30 graphic works, one section is dedicated to artist’s books conceived in dialogue with poetic texts by Leonardo Sinisgalli, Reiner Maria Rilke, Dante and the Taiwanese philosopher Peter Mau-hsiu Yang. Meetings and guided tours with the artists and curators are planned during the exhibition. The title comes from a reflection by Michela Becchis “Immediate surroundings is the title of a collection by Vittorio Sereni in which the writer put together fiction and essays, autobiography and reflections on poetry, comments and considerations on friendship, on “agreement” as the writer defines it, that is, on getting in tune with other people, other artist and poet friends and different expressive pursuits. But surroundings are also an attunement with places, with a space marked inwardly by an equally inward imagination that makes it, precisely, surrounding… Here, Maria Pina Bentivenga and Mei Chen Tseng construct their immediate surroundings, their proximity precisely by transforming their signs into that compensation that reconstructs meaning”.
Maura Picciau, Director of the Central Institute for Graphics, said: “I am delighted to host an exhibition of open confrontation between different but consonant visual and chalcographic cultures, works and artistic thoughts that investigate nature and landscape with rigour and feeling. The Memorandum of Understanding between ICG and the Taipei Representative Office in Italy – Cultural Division is a significant milestone for both institutions”.
