On Drawing Places

The notion of place forms the conceptual axis of the exhibition, directing the relationships and tensions suggested by the arrangement and progression of works along the exhibition route. In this context, particular emphasis is placed on a significant group of works that reveal gestures, aesthetic attitudes, and conceptual formulations associated with the acts of delimiting, constructing, inhabiting, or mapping. These actions are understood as ways of affirming, inscribing, or making visible a presence in a specific territory. Meanwhile, as the counterpart of one same process of experience and spatial perception, the exhibition also explores the idea that the creative act is intimately linked to processes of demarcation, appropriation and reconfiguration of the space, particularly those involving drawing, simultaneously understood as a concept and as a privileged means of experimentation with forms. The artist does not merely represent a place, but constructs an intermediate territory, situated between reality and the imagination, where sensitive experience and symbolic projection interwine. Spanning a historical period stretching from the 1950s to the present, the exhibition brings together more than fifty artists—including various key figures from the history of national and international art—and a vast and diverse range of artistic practices, including painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, photography, and video.