Aldo Mondino
Visual Arts
Description
Description
Rossi & Rossi inaugurates its partnership with Giovanni Martino to show European art in Asia with an exhibition on the work of Italian postmodern provocateur Aldo Mondino (1938–2005). Centred on painting but also investigating sculpture and performance, Mondino’s work developed through the appropriation of the stylistic and formal qualities of both the historical avant-garde (Surrealism and Dadaism) and works produced by his contemporaries.
Mondino was fond of using unusual materials – linking the concepts of Arte Povera with emotions, which he represented with sculptures made of chocolate, paintings on sheets of linoleum, mosaics of marshmallows, carpets of coffee and seeds, and chandeliers of biros, as well as sculptures in bronze, ceramic, wood and glass. Considered amongst his most significant innovations, painting on linoleum allowed the artist to exploit the irregular patterns and colours of the substrate to great effect, in contrast to the predictability of canvas for portraiture.
The exhibition at Rossi & Rossi explores Mondino’s quest to reinvent painting in times of social and political transformation, with a particular focus on portraits and figurative painting on linoleum. Mondino’s extensive travels informed his capacity to put human relationships at the centre of his discovery of otherness, and enabled a highly anarchic and paradoxical practice to emerge, one driven by a feeling of cultural and creative nomadism.
Gallery highlights include Granada (1996), from a series of paintings of great sultans of the Ottoman Empire; Gnawa (1997), from a group of paintings on the eponymously named African dancers; and Choukri (1996), one of numerous portraits paying tribute to other artists and great thinkers.
Mondino’s series of paintings of sultans was first presented in a groundbreaking exhibition at Sperone Westwater in New York. Inspired by the research he conducted in Turkey and his travels to the region, the works depict thirty-two sultans who reigned between 1200 and 1938 (the death of the last Sultan, in exile, and the year of Mondino’s birth). One work from the series – a commanding diptych nearly three metres across – titled Granada, forgrounds Selim III (r. 1789–1807), the progressive ruler credited with modernising the Ottoman army.
Note：This event record is compiled from "Hong Kong Visual Arts Yearbook 2018" published by Department of Fine Arts, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
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