ARTIST AT GNAM
Emilio Isgrò: protagonist of 2024

The Artista alla GNAM initiative proposes, starting with Emilio Isgrò: Protagonist 2024, a program of “artists in residence,” or visiting artists, conceived with the formula “one year, one artist, one room.”

As happens in some international institutions, the museum will “host” an Italian artist for a year, organizing a series of meetings and exhibiting a significant selection of their works in one room.

The initiative, promoted and organized by GNAM Director Renata Cristina Mazzantini, in collaboration with the Emilio Isgrò Archive, with the contribution of Intesa Sanpaolo and Techbau as main sponsors, supported by Borghese Contemporary Hotel as technical sponsor, offers the museum public the opportunity to interact with the protagonists of contemporary Italian art, and allows scholars, as well as students from the Academies and Faculties of Valle Giulia, to delve into the artist’s work.

The figure of Emilio Isgrò, one of the most authoritative of Italian culture, already celebrated at GNAM with an important retrospective in 2013 and present in the museum's collections, has been selected for 2024 on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the “Cancellatura”: a radical artistic gesture that revolutionized the language of art internationally. It is the artistic gesture that characterizes Isgrò’s work: it starts from the word and supports memory, but it has nothing to do with “Cancel Culture,” which, on the contrary, it openly opposes.

For Artista alla GNAM, Isgrò created the work Isgrò cancella Isgrò, with the erasure of Autocurriculum, his autobiographical novel, which will be donated to the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art.

From May 14, Isgrò will also offer a series of seasonal “Erasure Lessons”, conceived as workshops open to scholars and students, where he will teach how to use the "brush" as a selective filter to isolate the essential.

These Erasure Lessons will be accompanied by invitation-only evenings dedicated to "Reflections on Erasure," a series of meetings involving writers, poets, journalists, and authors, invited to share their autobiographical relationship with the act of erasure. These meetings will offer the public a guide through the complex production of an artist who is also a poet, novelist, and playwright. The exhibition will be open from May 8 to December 31, 2024.

Emilio Isgrò
ARTIST AT GNAM - Emilio Isgrò: protagonist 2024
08 May - 31 December 2024
Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea
Viale delle Belle Arti 131 - 00197 Rome
T +39 06 322981
Info: lagallerianazionale.com