50 years! It was beyond my capabilities, in a single exhibition, to summarise the story of a lifetime, of experiences lived, and of how art has been able, since Pier Paolo Calzolari’s first exhibition in 1975, to change my way of seeing the world and my thinking. Hence the idea of spreading out the visions that I summarised in the three group exhibitions entitled Vue d’ensemble: imaginaries in dialogue (Part I) (Part II) and (Part III) over the past three years, right up to the present.

The works have interacted with each other in varying ways across these exhibitions, always offering a glimpse of a different moment in the work of each individual artist.

At the same time, solo exhibitions were organised both in Torre Pellice and in Turin, in chronological order, by Jan Vercruysse, Conrad Shawcross, Robin Rhode, Marisa Merz, Daniel Buren, Alfredo Pirri, Gilberto Zorio, Richard Long, Christiane Löhr, Gianni Caravaggio, Mario Airò – currently on display in Turin – and Tony Cragg with the exhibition Ge(schichte), opening on 5 October, in conjunction with Part III of Vue d’ensemble. I have vivid memories of the first exhibition with Tony Cragg in 1984, when Tony arrived for the first time at the then gallery site in Corso Tassoni after a long and very fast car journey. I like to think that the title chosen by the artist for the current exhibition is also a tribute to the gallery on this special occasion. In German, the Ge- prefix often refers to a collection of things, and Schicht means layer, a set of layers, metaphorically an overlapping of events, things that have happened, becoming a story: Geschichte. Having satisfied this personal desire of mine, I think more concretely about his work. Stack (Schicht - layer) is a title that has accompanied him since his early works, in which overlapping elements present a taxonomic view of the world. He himself has stated that he considers man-made objects to be “fossilised keys to a past time that is our present”. Similarly, the arrangements of objects on the floor and walls that he began to create in the 1980s blur the boundary between artificial and natural landscapes: they create the outline of something familiar, where the individual parts are inextricably linked to the whole. Cragg understands sculpture as a study of how materials and concrete forms influence and shape our ideas and emotions. The human figure is the prime example of something that ultimately seems organic and elicits emotional responses, yet is fundamentally an extremely complex geometric composition of molecules, cells, organs and processes. His work does not imitate nature and our appearance, but rather focuses on why we look the way we do and why we are the way we are.

The works on display, from Riot (1987) to the most recent, Incident, Stand, Hedges, testify to the artist’s ongoing exploration of the energy that is inherent in matter, whether organic or inorganic, which permeates the whole world.

In a dedicated room, the exhibitions are accompanied by a series of projections recounting our story – mine and Tucci’s – together with the artists from 1975 to the present day.

(Text by Lisa [Tucci] Russo)