Take an object / Do something to it /Do something else to it.

Curator Marcello Smarrelli invites local and foreign artists to an open dialogue with the city of Rome for his third exhibition at Fondazione Memmo titled Conversation Piece | Part 3. Artists Jonathan Baldock, Piero Golia, Magali Reus , Claudia Wieser were called to express their relationship with the Eternal City, which has always been a vibrant hub for contemporary art since the 50’s. The project itself was conceived with the aim of continually reviewing the contemporary Roman art scene, which remains pretty much out of the radar of the general public, but it’s surprisingly active and it features cutting edge galleries, foundations, Academies and foreign cultural institutes. Inspired by one of the most famous movies by Luchino Visconti: Gruppo di Famiglia in un interno (Conversation Piece, 1974), Conversation Piece challenges new generations of artists to face Rome and its incredibly ancient and contemporary history through different creative researches, poetry and artistic techniques. The third edition of this series of exhibitions meditates on the principle of defamiliarization of an object that Jasper Johns highlighted in the early sixties with the statement “Take an object / Do something to it / Do something else to it”.  In line with this principle, the featured artists give new meaning to items borrowed from the everyday life by putting them in a new context, while subtly dealing with the ever-present discussion on the the contemporary art object and its value in relation to the commercial product. Baldock, Golia, Reus and Wieser create their own language of phisical entities, revealing the unexpected power of everyday objects that, thanks to the artist, enter into the “other” dimension of an exhibition space.