Colors on Stage: Shozo Shimamoto, Hermann Nitsch, Georges Mathieu, Marcello Lo Giudice, Yang Maoyuan

Colors on stage, patronaged by the Municipality of Genoa and shown in ABC-ARTE gallery in Via XX Settembre, pointed the attention on great storicized avant-guard artists, such as Shozo Shimamoto, Hermann Nitsch, Georges Mathieu and contemporary artists like Marcello Lo Giudice, Yang Maoyuan, celebrating the spectacular use of the pigment.

Most significative works has been exhibited to give an exhaustive view on artists' career, stressing influences and mutual interactions: Mathieu for Abstraction Lyrique, Nitsch for the Wiener Aktionismus, Shimamoto for Gutai's group. All those personality were from singolar, but comunicants artistic domains and often they easily cooperated togheter. Marcello Lo Giudice and Yang Maoyuan, artists of our age, learnt the basis of an informal heritage, are more for an experimentation of new languages in an universal and standardized context, but without giving up their respective identies.
Through the selection of works and the didactic mount an imaginary line was traced, to make the public aware of the exhisting relation between the artistic medium and the color matter, both able to carry out an evident social-historical situation. The exceptional employement of the color persuaded the viewer to the perception of the restless excitement of Mathieu, the introspective investigation of Nitsch, the spiritual exaltation in Shimamoto, the ancestral hope in Lo Giudice and the trascendental meditation in Maoyuan.
The recent departure of the great French Master George Mathieu will open the show with canvans from the monumental and japanese period, as well with the works on paper, part of the over known series of calendar-stamps. Anyway it'll be possible to examine other Mathieu's pieces from the 50ths, always part of the ABC-ARTE remarkable collection. Following the Nobel Prize Peace candidate, Shozo Shimamoto, will be presented by artworks made during his last performance organized by ABC-ARTE in Genova at the Palazzo Ducale's hall, where he traditionally crash bottle and glasses. The results are canvases scattered and soaked by colors and glass fragments. For the whole time of Colors on stage it will be possible to view the video of the just mentioned performance, sonorized by Philip Corner.
The heart of the gallery is occupied by the majestic works of Herman Nitsch's Malerei Aktion series. Despite of ABC is in possesion of other pieces of the Wiener Aktionismus, it has been chosen to favour those paints in wich blood, drained by the artist on canvas during cerimonies inspired by anciet sacrifices, assumes the role of a color itself.
The distinctions in picking works from Marcello Lo Giudice's production have been the positive message of the demolished beds, started from the idea of the Botticelli's Primavera masterpiece, and at the other side the possibility of the multi levelled oil on canvas that brings mind the imagination of a full detailled landsacep.
Finally the Chinese artist Yang Maoyuan, who operates a translation of the artworks on a more conceptual plan. All his multicolor sheepskins are inflated and they have becomed a symbol of a reflexion about the diversity of leading an argument between western and asian world.
All name displayed are part of relevant public and private collection since long time, but the interest in their work never knows stops. It happens rarely that their pieces are unsold at action houses bids, indeed they attract new museums and collectors, a fact that help the raising of their values thus considered ascending.