I sette pilastri dell’arte di oggi

We invite you to attend the presentation of the book "I sette pilastri dell'arte di oggi" (Mondadori Editore), by Flavio Caroli, art critic and historian, in dialogue with Paola Bertola, Design professor, Politecnico di Milano.
Introduction by Donatella Sciuto, Rector of the Politecnico di Milano.

"Of my time I am interested in everything. And if it is art, creativity and beauty, I simply get lost."

Flavio Caroli, one of Italy's best-known and most respected critics and art historians, has made us fall in love with the great works of the past. In this new volume, however, he prepares us to fall in love with "the genius of the year 2000" by identifying its "pillars", because "you cannot understand today's art if you do not at least know its foundations". At the origin of the many languages of contemporary art, Caroli identifies seven revolutions that have matured since the years of the Second World War.

The adventure cannot but begin with Action Painting and the canvases of Jackson Pollock - next to him, the Frenchman Jean Fautrier, founder of the Informal on this side of the Atlantic -, to continue with Pop Art in a "world that in every way escapes the confines of traditional visual art". While then photography and figurative painting, two languages that have been fighting each other for more than a century and a half, impose themselves through the shots of Irving Penn and Ugo Mulas, and the paintings of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud: everything is ready for the next revolutions. Environmental Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Arte Povera, Body Art, the self-destruction of London in the 1970s, the pioneering Marina Abramović, Abstract Art, Anish Kapoor, "the admirable bridge between the art of the East and the art of the West", up to the "anti-mannerist" 1980s - which always, in the different centuries, rather than closing their own time, anticipate the century that is about to begin -, with protagonists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, among others.

Flavio Caroli recounts the formation and evolution of these fundamental artistic junctures, pointing out their derivations, the legacies that have matured and the projections into the future. Between personal recollections, anecdotes and poetic interpretations, accompanied by images of the masterpieces of the last seventy years, I sette pilastri dell'arte di oggi is a precious viaticum for reading our contemporaneity through the eyes of aesthetics.

The event will be held in Italian.
Free admission with mandatory registration at the following link.