Platonic Love

22 September – 24 October
Piazza XXV Aprile, Milan

From Monday, September 22, the exhibition ‘Platonic Love’ by the artist Leonardo Pivi will continue, moving from the gallery spaces of Gluck50 to the public soil of Piazza XXV Aprile in Milan, where a large-size imposing sculpture specially designed for one of the most suggestive architectural and urban sites in the city on the will be on display. Consisting of a three meters majestic young beardless colossus holding a doll, the sculpture is hermetically closed in a synthetic shell that creates a surreal, aseptic and disquieting atmosphere, deliberately conceived to create a barrier aimed at overshadowing any interpretation.The event takes place at the end of a project Pivi started during the month of May in the prestigious residency for artists Gluck50.
‘Platonic Love’ is the most emblematic expression of Pivi’s new sculptural figurative cycle, where ancient stylistic elements blend with a contemporary and personal feel of a conceptual nature. The artwork will be exhibited till Friday 24th October.

press release
comunicato stampa

7 May – 26  July 2014
Gluck50, Milan

Gluck50 is located near Milan’s Central Railway Station, in via Gluck, one of the streets symbolizing the urban growth the city has experienced in the 1970s. Founded in 2013, Gluck50 is a private residence space for Italian and international artists, both established and emerging, who can express themselves in complete freedom, in order to create excellent art projects. One of Gluck50’s main objectives is to promote, support and document the development of contemporary artistic talents, sharing and contributing to the creation of ambitious, original and complex art projects.
After Thiago Rocha Pitta and Yuki Kimura, from May 7 to July 26, 2014, Gluck50 presents Platonic Love, a solo exhibition of Leonardo Pivi (b. Cesena, 1965), the artist has specifically designed for the exhibition space during his residence in 2013. For the occasion Pivi will exhibit a series of life-size marble statues sculpted and carved from plaster models, with the aim to retrieve formal classical models, where bizarre and personal typologies coexist and come to life showing a strong spatial vitality. The artist’s intervention, aided and abetted by his studies on light, has the ambition to update the concept of classical and neo-classical beauty of the human body in the third millennium. Caught in an attitude between the obscene and the provocative, Pivi’s characters evoke a variety of inspirational models such as an ideal and deified concept of beauty and religiously-shaped bodies that refer to the gods without preventing more contemporary references such as inflatable dolls and crash test dummies, giving a new look to marble’s cold nature and bringing back the attention to the human body and the values associated with it such as monumentality, dynamism, twisting and movement. Ranging from current events to topics considered cornerstones of existential anguish, Pivi investigates new possible poetic and expressive patterns using beauty as a restoring and comforting force.

A catalogue of the exhibition has been published by Mousse Publishing.

press release
comunicato stampa

Press office
CLP Relazioni Pubbliche Anna Defrancesco
tel. 02 36 755 700 anna.defrancesco@clponline.it;
Press release and images www.clponline.it