GILBERTO ZORIO
Castelbasso (Teramo), Fondazione Malvina Menegaz
July 25 – August 31, 2025
Promoted by Fondazione Malvina Menegaz per le Arti e le Culture
Curated by Ilaria Bernardi
The solo exhibition by Gilberto Zorio (Andorno Micca, Biella, 1944) pays tribute to one of Italy’s leading artists and a prominent exponent of the Arte Povera movement.
It is spread across two venues, Palazzo De Sanctis and Palazzo Clemente, and is conceived as an incursion into the artist’s 60 years of activity, from the mid-1960s to the present day, through a selection of 30 iconic works.
At Palazzo De Sanctis, the exhibition is spread over the three floors of the building, outlining a chronological and thematic journey through the main iconographic and conceptual motifs of the artist’s work: from the chemical and physical reactions developed in the second half of the 1960s through the combination of elements including Dalmine pipes, cement, sulfur powder, copper sulfate, hydrochloric acid, and copper (on the ground floor of the building), to the works of the 1970s in which light and words become agents of transformation (on the first floor of the building), to the later works which, evoking the typical backward-forward throw of the javelins of which they are made, embody the convergence between past, present, and future (on the second floor, in front of the first flight of stairs on the ground floor and above that first flight of stairs in the building).
The second part of the exhibition is held at Palazzo Clemente and focuses on the possible variations of the iconographic-conceptual element for which Zorio is best known: the star, which has been part of his lexicon since 1972. Stars appearing on leather, parchment, copper, iron, aluminum, as well as stars drawn on paper to design large Star Towers, accompany visitors towards a “revelation”: “The star is a fantastic image, extremely energetic, floating in space… a metaphor for an unattainable but conceivable mirage,” as the artist explains.