DS_STUDIO

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the foundation of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Bologna, MAMbo presents the great collective exhibition Facile ironia. The irony in Italian art between XX and XXI century , with the curatorship of Lorenzo Balbi and Caterina Molteni.

Designed for the spaces of the Sala delle Ciminiere, with more than 100 works and archive documents by over 70 artists, the exhibition spans a period of about seventy years – from the fifties to today – Proposing to retrace the history of Italian art through the theme of irony.

The exhibition’s title is ironic in itself, as it recalls the apparent simplicity of the phenomenon while revealing its intrinsic complexity. A contradiction that becomes a game in itself and invites the public to question the nature of language, the common places that accompany it and, at the same time, on how they influence our observation and interpretation of the world around us.

Italian artists and artists of several generations have shared an aesthetic and existential strategy that embraces the “cosmic joke” of reality.

This critical and imaginative context is told in the exhibition by the development of macro-thematic areas, useful in illustrating the different declinations of irony and the trans-historicity of the phenomenon: the paradox, its connection with the game, irony as a feminist weapon of criticism of the Italian social order and patriarchy, its relationship with political mobilization, irony as a form of institutional critique, as a practice of nonsense and finally as dark humor.