{"id":3721,"date":"2023-10-27T12:11:34","date_gmt":"2023-10-27T16:11:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ambwashingtondc.esteri.it\/chi-siamo\/la-sede\/villa-firenze-contemporanea-il-meglio-dellarte-e-del-design-contemporanei-italiani-a-washington-dc\/mario-ceroli\/"},"modified":"2023-11-09T12:07:30","modified_gmt":"2023-11-09T17:07:30","slug":"mario-ceroli","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/ambwashingtondc.esteri.it\/en\/chi-siamo\/la-sede\/villa-firenze-contemporanea-il-meglio-dellarte-e-del-design-contemporanei-italiani-a-washington-dc\/mario-ceroli\/","title":{"rendered":"Mario Ceroli"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><strong>Girl from Florence I<\/strong><\/em>, high relief on Russian pine wood and gold leaf, 110 15\/64 \u00d7 43 5\/16 \u00d7 55 1\/8 in.<br \/>\n<strong><em>Girl from Florence II<\/em><\/strong>, high relief on Russian pine wood and gold leaf, 110 15\/64 \u00d7 43 5\/16 \u00d7 55 1\/8 in.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-large wp-image-3713 img-fluid\" src=\"https:\/\/ambwashingtondc.esteri.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/Villa-Firenze-Washington-Ambasciata-Italiana-Ceroli-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" srcset=\"https:\/\/ambwashingtondc.esteri.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/Villa-Firenze-Washington-Ambasciata-Italiana-Ceroli-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/ambwashingtondc.esteri.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/Villa-Firenze-Washington-Ambasciata-Italiana-Ceroli-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/ambwashingtondc.esteri.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/Villa-Firenze-Washington-Ambasciata-Italiana-Ceroli-768x576.jpg 768w, https:\/\/ambwashingtondc.esteri.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/Villa-Firenze-Washington-Ambasciata-Italiana-Ceroli.jpg 1500w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"ILfuVd\" lang=\"it\"><span class=\"d9FyLd\">\u00a9Foto <\/span><\/span>Massimo Listri<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Mario Ceroli (Castel Frentano 1938)<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>He began his career in Rome in the 1950s, working initially with Fazzini, Leoncillo and Colla, his professors at the State Art Institute, creating ceramic sculptures. In 1958, he began working with logs of wood, into which he hammered carpenter\u2019s nails. In 1960, he won the GNAM award for young sculptors. He uses rough wooden planks to create letters, numbers, everyday objects and the shaped silhouettes of figures, often replicated to create environments, such as Cassa Sistina (Sistine Crate), a prize winner at the 1966 Venice Biennale. From 1966 to 1968 he lived in New York, while participating in exhibitions of Arte Povera in Italy, at the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo and at the Biennials of S\u00e3o Paulo and Paris. In 1969, he made an ice sculpture for the Spoleto Festival. From the 1970s onward, he created wooden models of the architectural enclosures of religious spaces. In the 1980s, he began to experiment with glass, creating works in the round. He participated in six editions of the Venice Biennale and four editions of the Rome Quadriennale. His solo exhibitions include those in Parma (1969), Pesaro (1972), Florence (1983), Beijing (1999), Buenos Aires (2000), Rome (2000 and 2007) and Bologna (2012). From 1968 he also worked in theater, cinema and television, collaborating with Ronconi, Pasolini, Patroni Griffi, Bolognini, Pressburger, Amodio and Macchi, and taught scenography at the Academy of Fine Arts in L\u2019Aquila. Ceroli has created major art works for public spaces: Squilibrio (Unbalance), exhibited at Graz for Trigon \u201867, at Leonardo da Vinci Airport in Rome and at Leonardo\u2019s House in Vinci, Cavallo Alato (Winged Horse) in the RAI Studios at Saxa Rubra, Goal di Italia \u201890 (Goal of Italy 1990) in Rome and L\u2019Albero della Vita (Tree of Life) in Sestriere. His monumental works include churches in Rome, Porto Rotondo and Naples and the State Police Memorial in Rome. Since 1989 he has been a member of the Accademia di San Luca and since 2004 Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.<\/p>\n<p>Two gilded Venuses, made of pine wood, welcome the visitor in the atrium, like shadows of Botticelli\u2019s famous masterpiece in the Uffizi Gallery. The figure of the goddess of beauty symbolically frames the entrance to the Ambassador\u2019s office: symmetry, desired by the artist, becomes the theme of the composition, spectacularly framing the flags of Italy and the EU visible in the background. The Girl from Florence, bidimensional and designed for a frontal view, is emblematic of Ceroli\u2019s style. Since the 1960s, he has used raw wood\u2014an inexpensive material, which caused him to later be associated with Arte Povera by Germano Celant\u2014 in order to carve out, place side by side or create series of stylized silhouettes, repeatable outlines of figures stripped down to the essential. At the same time, it is representative of Ceroli\u2019s elegant reinterpretation of art history and of his reinvention of the icons of the past, from antiquity or the Renaissance. Quoting Botticelli\u2019s Birth of Venus, which itself borrowed Hellenistic stylistic elements, and self-referencing his own Goldfinger\/Miss (1964), the artist celebrates an iconography that is refined but stripped of all monumentality, embracing a non-descriptive figuration reminiscent of pop art, as it states that Simonetta Vespucci, Botticelli\u2019s muse and model, was a celebrity before the term even existed. In doing so, he creates a play of references between Italian art, immersed in the constant flow of history, and the influences of American pop art, which Ceroli watched closely in the 1960s. The Girl from Florence builds an ideal bridge between both sides of the Atlantic, beautifully expressing the founding principle of the Villa Firenze Contemporanea project. (Renata Cristina Mazzantini)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Girl from Florence I, high relief on Russian pine wood and gold leaf, 110 15\/64 \u00d7 43 5\/16 \u00d7 55 1\/8 in. Girl from Florence II, high relief on Russian pine wood and gold leaf, 110 15\/64 \u00d7 43 5\/16 \u00d7 55 1\/8 in. \u00a9Foto Massimo Listri &nbsp; Mario Ceroli (Castel Frentano 1938) He began [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"parent":3636,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-3721","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ambwashingtondc.esteri.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ambwashingtondc.esteri.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ambwashingtondc.esteri.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ambwashingtondc.esteri.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ambwashingtondc.esteri.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3721"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ambwashingtondc.esteri.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3721\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4219,"href":"https:\/\/ambwashingtondc.esteri.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3721\/revisions\/4219"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ambwashingtondc.esteri.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ambwashingtondc.esteri.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}