Ugo La Pietra, Interno / Esterno: Architettura - Natura, 2015, terracotta

The new season of exhibitions of the gallery o-ABC-ARTE continues with another retrospective in two acts, or rather, in two spaces (Genoa and Milan), which will both host a unique and grand protagonist: Ugo La Pietra.

Tomorrow at 18:30 hours on Thursday 16 March ABC-ARTE will inaugurate in Genoa, Via XX Settembre 11a, a large-scale exhibition, “Ugo La Pietra. L'Artista e la Città”, dedicated to the work of Ugo La Pietra.

The artist, architect by training, film maker, editor, musician, cartoonist and teacher, but above all researcher on the system of communication and of the visual arts, as he prefers to define himself. In this comprehensive exhibition route curated by Flaminio Gualdoni, Ugo La Pietra immerses us in more than fifty years of study on the relation individual-surroundings. He has explored this relation primarily in the urban context, arguing for the demolition of the barrier between public and private space. He has done so using various forms of expression and an artistic practice motivated by the slogan ‘To inhabit is to be at home everywhere’.

The genoese act extends from Recupero e reinvenzione, 1969, photographic collages with pen or pencil interventions inspired by Narrative Art and representing an organic dissection of the different ways in which city dwellers live in and appropriate the public space within the urban periphery of Milan. After these analyses, the exhibition continues with other observations that gradually shift from the periphery to the centre of the city, with works like those in the series Il Monumentalismo, 1972.
In the course of time, the artist’s research takes the form of a series of painting able to narrate the ‘alternative routes’ (les chemins du dérive) within an urban structure that grows in an unregulated way (also described in his recent book La città senza morale, 2022) and which in the last few years have been conceived as ‘inventive’ variations within the concept of territoriality. Amid urban spaces and gardens, La Pietra creates a critically lucid and poetically intense route, as in La città scorre ai miei piedi (2011/2021), Itinerari preferenziali (2005/2022), Il giardino luogo di spettacolarità e concettualità (2018/2022).