Angelo Bellobono - Linea Appennino 1201 | Opening on January 16, 2019

AlbumArte presents

Angelo Bellobono
Linea Appennino 1201

Curated by Elisa Del Prete

Opening on Wednesday, January 16^th 2019 at 6:30PM

Open to the public until February 28^th, 2019

AlbumArte | via Flaminia 122, Roma

Linea Appennino 1201, a personal exhibition by Angelo Bellobono, opens at AlbumArte on Wednesday 16 January 2019. The body of pictorial works spans across his latest artistic research and is exhibited for the first time. The exhibition is curated by Elisa Del Prete and will remain open to the public until February 28, 2019.

Specifically realized for AlbumArte, the exhibition owes its name to the path the artist took last summer along the ridge of the Appennine Mountains, climbing the main peaks of each Italian region, from the Pollino – Dolcedorme of the Calabria-Basilicata’s southern border, to the extreme north of Mount Maggiorasca in Liguria.

The journey gave birth to a group of works realized using original soils collected from those peaks. Included in the works, Monte Appennino is a large painting where all soils are mixed together giving life to the memory of an imagined mountain. Linea Appennino 1201 builds on Bellobono’s research on the Mediterranean Sea perceived as a large lake nestled between the mountains; for him a place of constant experience, work, and research, both as a kid, as a ski instructor, and as an artist. Somehow, it is also a look at inland Italy, a trail of memory and imagination, a bridge between the north and south, enriching the exploration of the connection between territories that Bellobono has been conducting for years.

When this exhibition was conceived, Angelo expressed to me the desire to display his painting, after a long time in which his efforts and engagement with public shows had been focused on “projects”, such as surveys of territories, places and roots, geology and anthropology. Painting represents the most personal and private part of this research: a means of expression he has been practiced without interruption in order to substantiate his experiences through art. As he often says, painting is an act of restitution of one’s own history and memory. (Elisa Del Prete)

I paint to go back home. Painting is my map, made by sweat, wind, cold, sun, climbs and descents. It is the construction of the path. (Angelo Bellobono)

Thanks to Casale del Giglio for the wine tasting on the opening day.

Angelo Bellobono (b. Nettuno – Italy, 1964) is an artist and a ski coach. Through paintings, video and performance Bellobono investigates issues of belonging and identity. His work transmute the real, the landscape and the face in a rigorous distillate of atmospheres and suspended tales, which investigate the relationship between anthropology, geology, border and territory. He constantly experiences a sense of bodily belonging to the places, an experience necessary to read sedimentations and memories of the landscape. Ice and mountains, are important elements of his work, ice representing the planet’s archival memory, and mountains depicted as hinges and not barriers, connecting different cultures rather than dividing them, to build bridges and continuity of borders. Bellobono has made several interdisciplinary activities and projects in which art, sport and biosustainability become instruments of social connectivity and microeconomic development, as in the case of Atla(s)now with the Amazigh communities of the Moroccan High Atlas, or Before me and after my time involving the Ramapough Lenape, the Native American natives of New York and Io sono Futuro in the Appennine areas affected by the earthquake. In the summer of 2018, as part of the new project Linea Appennino 1201, he crossed all the Italian Apennine peaks from the south, Calabria, to the north Liguria. He participated in the XV Quadriennale of Rome and in the IV and V Biennial of Marrakech and at the museum exhibition De prospectiva Pingendi in Todi and Selvatico in Cotignola. He has exhibited in public and private spaces such as the American University’s Katzen Art Center in Washington, the Mars space in Milan, the Volume Foundation in Rome, the Museum of Modern Art in Cairo and New Delhi, the Macro Museum in Rome, the Museum Ciac di Genazzano, Palazzo Re Enzo in Bologna, the Othersize gallery in Milan, the Wunderkammern Gallery in Rome, the Changing Role Gallery in Naples and Envoy Gallery in New York, Frank Pages in Geneva, Biasa ArtSpace in Bali. He won the Celeste Prize for Painting in 2005 and the Drawing Artslant in 2009. He was a finalist in the Lissone Prize, the Combat Prize, and the Portali dello Scompiglio Prize. In 2010 he was invited to I Martedì critici and in 2015 to Tedx-Rome. Over the years he has been invited to various residences such as Bocs Cosenza, Landina Cars Omegna, La or Le Mon San Ceasario Foundation of Lecce. His work is found in numerous public and private collections.

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