Until 26 August 2018, Mart (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto) hosts a curatorial focus on Trama (Weave), Un millimetro (One Millimetre) and Sottilissime (Extremely thins), curated by Denis Isaia and realized in collaboration with Archivio Pietro Consagra.
Trama (Weave), an environment first presented in 1972, at the 36th Venice Biennale, is exhibited again for the first time in a layout design embodying the plastic and spatial values that characterise the research of the artist, who since the 1950s has been engaged in a radical revisitation of the concept of frontal sculpture.
Originally installed at the entrance of Italian Pavilion, in the spaces leading to the exhibition “Aspects of Contemporary Italian Sculpture”, the work is made up of seven wooden sculptures, much taller than a man and coloured sky-blue, white, black and brown, standing on a platform and close to one another, which made it impossible to contemplate them from a distance. Towered over by diversified sculptures, visitors feel like they have stepped into a dense forest of curves set in layers, of surfaces that interfered one with the other and of which they became part. At the end of this maze-like space, on a pedestal designed by Carlo Scarpa, visitors encounter and can browse a book made of steel, consisting of 12 sculpture-pages, which Consagra named after its overall thickness: Un Millimetro (One Millimetre).
Completing the display are some sculptures from the Sottilissime (Extremely thins) series, with which Consagra renewed his investigation into the relationship between surface and environment, pushing matter toward its physical limits.