A MEMORIA DI FORMA-IN MEMORY OF SHAPE

Locandina della mostra di arte contemporanea alla Gipsoteca di Arte Antica

“The works of Caterina Sbrana and Gabriele Mallegni with their enigmatic, almost conflicting, collocation
in the sites of the museum conservatin conservation, mark a new declination of the concepts of transience and
generative potential linked to the uniqueness of the work, its reproducibility, copying and casting. The work of the
two artists enacts the space of the absence and its imprint as if this were a time machine, a device designed to tell the vanished shape and other stories woven around this shape, between traumatic events and founding myths, between resistances and metamorphoses.”
Pietro Gaglianò

The Exhibition “A memoria di forma”, curated by Pietro Gagliano is currently on display at the Gipsoteca di Arte antica of the University of Pisa until the 1st of March.
The exhibition puts into dialogue the models of ancient art belonging to the collection with contemporary art, a reflection on the imprint and the cast which can evoke landscapes, fragments of nature and the memory and wounds of war.
The exhibition brings together eight works from the individual and joint research of Caterina Sbrana and Gabriele Mallegni, all the works presented of the two italian artists are linked, in the creation process, by the partial or total use of the casting technique used to obtain the cast, the impression and therefore the copy of a model, of an object or a work.
In the exhibition, curated by Pietro Gaglianò, this ancient technique, “a primitive technical device”, which has undergone very few variations in its fundamental steps from ancient times to the present day and which was investigated in the famous essay “The similarity by contact” by Didi-Huberman, reveals itself in its complexity as an instrument for the transmission of memory, as a disturbing manifestation of an absence, as a hypothesis of regeneration and transformation through the combinatorial possibility of imprints and fragments.