ANDREA FOGLI. 7 ATLANTI

The exhibition, curated by Stefano Chiodi, brings together for the very first time the most important cycles of work by Andrea Fogli (Rome, b. 1959) from 2000 to the present day. Each cycle, in the sense of an Atlas, a diorama of real or imaginary figures and places, was completed day after day, like a diary, with a different number of figures: 59 like the beads of a rosary, 365 like the days in a year, or 111 like the pages in Alighiero Boetti’s hermetic red books. The tour, leading us from the shapeless to an extreme clarity of image, begins with the Garden Ephermerides (2019) consisting of multi-material polychrome sculptures, photos and hand-written texts, and moves on to the Sleepers cycle comprising small unbaked clay ‘grains’ made between October 2021 and March 2022 and to the drawings that make up the Diary of Shadows (2000 – 2006), together with the polychrome terracottas in the Small People cycle (2019 – 2022).
 

The core of the exhibition consists of 111 pencil drawings in the Seers cycle (2002 – 2024) on display here in its entirety for the very first time. Each drawing depicts the eyes and gaze of a ‘visionary’ who has swum ‘against the tide’ and ‘against the times’, from Pier Paolo Pasolini and Etty Hillisum to Martin Luther King, Alexander Langer, Bernadette Soubirous, Hannah Arendt, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Walt Disney, Rosa Luxemburg, Maria Montessori… a cycle enshrining a collective memory that includes figures who have worked in various different fields and whom the artist has brought together as “heretical visionary masters”, the kind of people who should be our guides as we tackle the difficult challenges posed by the 21st century.
 

The exhibition winds up with two cycles devoted to the theme of the face, Diary of the 59 Grains of Clay (2013 – 2014) and Diary of the 59 Grains of Dust (2020 – 2021).