Artista alla GNAM - Emilio Isgrò: protagonista 2024

With the “Artista alla GNAM” initiative, La Galleria Nazionale National Gallery is offering the general public a program of “visiting artists”: each year, a selected Italian artist will have a dedicated room to exhibit a significant selection of his or her work, with lectures and meetings taking place in parallel. The star of 2024 is Emilio Isgrò, one of the most internationally known names in contemporary Italian art.

Already present in the museum’s collections, the Sicilian master is a conceptual artist and painter, but also a poet, writer, playwright and director. He was chosen for the first edition of the event also to celebrate the 60th anniversary of his first “Cancellatura” (Erasure), visible on a fragment of a newspaper sheet “erased” in 1964: a revolutionary artistic gesture that starts from the word and sustains memory, but has nothing to do with “Cancel Culture”.

On display in the room are some of Emilio Isgrò’s most recent works, such as “Tables of the Law or the Glass Bible” (1994), and “Planetarium” (2023). Created especially for the event is the work “Isgrò cancella Isgrò - Isgrò erases Isgrò” featuring the black and gold erasures of Autocurriculum, his autobiographical novel. The work will be donated to the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art and will remain in the museum’s permanent collection.