Collezione Maramotti presents Through the Floods, an exhibition on the theme of catastrophe. Built around artworks from the collection’s archive – many of them never previously exhibited in this space – this large group show will juxtapose them, for the first time, with masterpieces of the past on loan from prestigious international institutions.
Featuring over fifty works that date from the twelfth century BCE to the present, it offers an asynchronous look at human and planetary disasters, drawing connections between images from very different eras, but also highlighting changes in the general sensitivity and response to catastrophic experience over the course of time.
The circular path through the exhibition will open and close with Filippo Palizzi’s majestic painting Oltre il Diluvio (After the Deluge, 1864), a unique depiction of what happened after the Flood: amid a harsh, rugged landscape that has just emerged from the waters, where the stranded ark seems almost turned to stone and Noah is nowhere in sight, a vibrant explosion of multicoloured animals pours out across the canvas, presided over by the faint trace of a rainbow.
Floods, shipwrecks, explosions, hurricanes, wildfires, wars, epidemics, human actions that ravage nature: can a catastrophic event become a form of discovery or a gateway into a new scenario? What private and shared imaginaries does it evoke with its implication of “reversal” and “upheaval”; what visions for our journey through this world?
Nowadays, cataclysmic events are no longer such an anomalous experience. Fuelled by specific political and economic decisions and arising from long-term processes that continue to unfold, disasters feel less and less unexpected, having become a recurrent, almost constant presence in our lives.
At the same time, the constant flow of information and images seems to have dulled the intensity of our reaction to these phenomena: media saturation and overexposure paradoxically tend to desensitize the gaze, yielding a generalized, simplified response.
In a situation where equilibrium has been replaced by incessant cycles of destruction, and in a present where transcendence and spirituality seem to have been set aside, can art encourage us to struggle on? Can it denounce the spread of apathy, offer some glimmer of hope? Now that we have lost our awe and fear of extraordinary events, and moved beyond the sense of tragedy and horror so vividly expressed by artists of the past, what tools and what images – filtered, mediated, conceptualized, aestheticized – are used to express the idea of disaster, crisis and apocalypse (without end, without rebirth) in the art of our time?
Through the Floods moves through rooms that explore different themes: the cataclysms caused by nature and the elements, the difficult relationship between human beings and other members of the animal kingdom, the violence of war, the experience of illness, and a tragic epilogue. The final room is a place of private reflection, housing enigmatic, “nocturnal” works that pose a constellation of questions.
The visitor experience is also expanded by a series of texts that weave thematic connections between the exhibition and a series of works on the first and second floor of the permanent collection (which can be visited by booking in advance).
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with essays by literary historian Andrea Cortellessa, philosopher Federico Ferrari, and art historian Riccardo Venturi.
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