SERGIO AGOSTI OFF LOOM | OLTRE IL TELAIO
Museo del Tessile di Chieri May 12 – 30, 2023
Inauguration: Friday, May 12, 4 p.m. (Free admission)
Admission with ticket: 3 euros (museum + exhibition)
on days when the Textile Museum is open until May 30 (Saturdays 2-6 p.m., Tuesdays 10 a.m.-12 p.m.)
Reservations welcome: prenotazioni@fmtessilchieri.org
Catalog curated by Silvana Nota e Melanie Zefferino
www.fmtessilchieri.org
Curated by Silvana NOTA
On Friday, May 12, at 4 p.m., the exhibition “Sergio Agosti: Off Loom | Beyond the Loom“, curated by Silvana Nota and hosted until May 30, opens at the Textile Museum in Chieri (Textile Gate Room, Via Santa Clara 10).
Painter, sculptor, engraver, Sergio Agosti (1933-2003) was a multifaceted and refined artist who in his conceptual matrix research experimented with oil and encaustic, the layering of vegetable cartoons, collage also with the use of Japanese rice paper, etching, lithography and intaglio for the creation of artist’s books, up to Mandalas created with powdered pigments and minerals on paper supports.
Beginning in the 1970s, Sergio Agosti developed an unprecedented cycle of works in which he employed the textile element, anticipating in Italy the innovative international experiences related to the Fiber Art movement.
Trained in Piacenza, Agosti made his debut at a very young age, just 22, inaugurating with his first solo exhibition an uninterrupted exhibition activity in the years to come, especially in Italy but also participation in events of international scope. In 1961 he moved to Turin and later to Chieri, where he lived until his death in 2003, and where in 1972 he received the prestigious “Navetta d’Oro” award. In the Master’s Chieri atelier, his most extensive production of works of art was born.
The exhibition “Sergio Agosti: Off Loom | Beyond the Loom” is intended to be – ninety years after his birth and twenty years after his death – a tribute to a pioneer of textile art through twelve works that are part of the Trame d’Autore Civic Collection, joined by some loans from the Artist’s family.
Writes the curator of the exhibition, Silvana Nota: “An artist of extraordinary rigor and at the same time light and lyrical in the unmistakable timbre of his stylistic signature, Sergio Agosti was a great experimenter who relentlessly traveled the path of research as an indispensable discipline for achieving the harmonic symbiosis between poetic elaboration and sign-formal development. In this dimension, where sculpture, collage, chalcography, serigraphy, Japanese papers, artist’s books, assemblage and visual poetry find expression, there is the encounter, in the 1970s, with the textile element of which he senses the potential enclosed in the millenary deposit of memories and beauty. Thus began a relevant production of works that stand out for their avant-garde connotations on the side of the international Fiber Art movement, which precisely in those years found its precise identity, and which in Chieri, where Agosti lived and had his studio, would find an important reference point starting in 1998 thanks to the Chieri Biennials that saw the arrival of artists from all over the world.”
In the rarefied atmosphere of the hall of the “Textile Door,” once the chapel of the convent of Santa Chiara with a 15th-century layout, one can admire elegant unconventional Tapestries, Assemblages, Theaters, Stitched Stones, works made with Chierese Bandera cloth, sculptures and installations that know how to capture attention for their profound meaning, for their delicate and dreamlike beauty, and that represent an important vehicle to speak to the general public, as well as to experts, about the multiple expressive possibilities of the ancient Chierese textile tradition, which Sergio Agosti has admirably declined into art with a conceptual matrix.
