Born in 1876 in Romania and naturalized French citizen, Constantin Brancusi is considered one of the greatest sculptors of the 20th century, the father of modern sculpture. The Colosseum Archaeological Park, in collaboration with the Centre National d’art et de la culture Georges Pompidou in Paris, presents a selection of his works in the exhibition space of the Uccelliere Farnesiane that revolve around a central theme of Brancusi’s artistic production: the bestiary of birds, a symbol of flight, of man’s dream of escaping his earthly condition.
The exhibition is organized in the two rooms of the Uccelliere, a symbolic place of the city, rediscovered at the end of the 18th century by travelers on the Grand Tour. The first section exhibits the sculptures The Cock (Le Coq), The Bird (L’Oiselet) and Leda, works created between 1925 and 1935 and emblematic of Brancusi’s research, which invents a symbolic and minimal figuration to express the essence of the animal. To illustrate how the artistic expressions of the past influenced Brancusi’s visual culture, these works are joined by a selection of ancient sculptures (statues, unguentaria and rattles) from the Museo Nazionale Romano, the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Venezia and the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia.
The second section investigates the use of the photographic medium as an artistic expression as well as research. In the 1920s and 1930s, the artist turned to photography and film, exploiting these means of expression to enhance the plastic qualities of his sculptures, as well as to document them. Photography and film were in fact tools for Brancusi to capture the ephemeral and fragmentary character of sculpture, which eluded a total perception of form, and to project Brancusi’s sculptures into a temporal dimension, transforming them into structures in the process of becoming, in perpetual tension between genesis and destruction.
The exhibition design by architect Dolores Lettieri emphasises the dichotomy between white (the color of Brancusi’s atelier), considered a true design element, and black, a reminder of the camera obscura and the alchemy of the photographic process.
Brancusi, Scolpire il volo, photo Simona Murrone
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