Marina Apollonio: Beyond the Circle
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
October 12, 2024 – March 03, 2025

“Having selected a primary form, such as a circle, I study its structural possibilities as a means of activating it, aiming for the best results with the maximum economy.” – Marina Apollonio.

From October 12, 2024, through March 2, 2025, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents Marina Apollonio: Beyond the Circle, the most comprehensive museum retrospective in Italy dedicated to Marina Apollonio, a leading figure in the international Optical and Kinetic avant-garde whose work was championed by Peggy Guggenheim.

Organized by independent art historian and curator Marianna Gelussi, the exhibition features about one hundred works on loan from the artist’s collection, as well as from national and international museums, including the Neue Gallery in Graz; the Fondation Villa Datris in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, France; the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome; MART in Rovereto, Italy; the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin; the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen and the Museum Ritter in Waldenbuch, Germany; and the Museum Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich.

Marina Apollonio: Beyond the Circle is a deserved tribute to the Triestine artist, tracing her career from 1963 to the present. The show highlights her rigorous visual investigations, encompassing painting, sculpture, and drawing, as well as static, moving, and environmental works, black-and-white or chromatic paintings, and experimentations in a variety of media and techniques. The fact that this homage is presented in the galleries of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni is particularly fitting, not only because Venice is Apollonio’s adoptive city, where she lived as a girl and took her first steps as an artist, but also because it highlights the role of visionary collector Peggy Guggenheim in her career.

The exhibition Marina Apollonio: Beyond the Circle will introduce visitors to the artist’s multiple lines of enquiry, which take shape through a rigorous method and continual experimental investigations around and beyond the circle. Structures, lines, multiple techniques, and diverse media carry form beyond the limits of its surface and frame, introducing movement to space and perception and opening passages to new dimensions. The vitality of Apollonio’s works is expressed through elegant and perfectly programmed execution: geometry, far from being a sterile structure, comes to life, mirroring the universe and its mathematical order. The circle returns obsessively in infinite variations. Through its repetitions it becomes charged with symbolic value, revealing a desire for expansion, fusion, and totality. 

Visitors will be able to admire the iconic Dimaniche circolari series, started in 1963 and consisting of static and mobile objects that explore the structure and the possibility of activating the circle, and the intense vitality of the Rilievi, some of the artist’s earliest works. Created in the 1960s and 1970s, these are metallic structures that capture and refract the surrounding environment. The exhibition also includes sculptures based on the circle and its multiplication, characterized by the reflective property of metal; the elegant Gradazioni, paintings of concentric circles created from the second half of the 1960s; the slender Rilievi a diffusione cromatica, white monochrome relief-paintings from the early 1970s, in which circles carved into plastic support and painted in the grooves are activated by the viewer’s movement; and the Espansioni, small-scale paintings from the same period which feature chromatic explosions of concentric colored lines.

Apollonio’s oeuvre is also explored through her drawings, her first investigations on paper, and previously unpublished archival material, shedding light on lesser-known aspects of her production and revealing the determined coherence and the simple harmony and energy of her poetics. The exhibition also features two new site-specific projects which highlight the contemporary relevance of Apollonio’s investigations: the environment Entrare nell’opera, created by the artist, especially for the exhibition, and the equally new musical installation Endings, the result of a recent collaboration with composer Guglielmo Bottin, developed out of the spiral in Fusione circolare of 2016.

more. www.guggenheim-venice.it