It's happening again - Adrian Tranquilli

The ground-floor galleries of the Museo di Roma at Palazzo Braschi are hosting a solo exhibition by the artist Adrian Tranquilli, who was born in Melbourne in 1966 and has been based in Rome for many years. The project, promoted by Roma Capitale, Department of Culture, and organised by Studio Stefania Miscetti, with museum services provided by Zètema Progetto Cultura, comprises three new installations that highlight the key themes of Adrian Tranquilli’s artistic output.

Drawing on a vast array of material ranging from art to music, and from literature to anthropology, the artist has constructed a personal vision that incorporates diverse cultural references, focusing on figures who have had a profound impact on the collective imagination: that of the hero and his opposite, the anti-hero. The protagonist of the project at the Museo di Roma is the Joker, the anti-hero par excellence, an ambiguous and mercurial figure who, like the medieval jester, operates in a space of deviation from the rules, disrupting the moral and symbolic structures at the base of the founded.

In the large wall-mounted book “My Little White Book” and the imposing totemic sculpture “Endsong”, Tranquilli uses inherently unstable materials, such as playing cards. The “houses of cards” become a metaphor for the crisis and fragility of the structures of power and history, a theme the artist had already explored in his 2009 work “All is Violent, All is Bright” – a sort of model of St Peter’s Basilica made up of more than 50,000 cards. The exhibition concludes with the monumental installation “In Excelsis 6” (a Batman stripped of his superhero powers), a work that explores concrete principles such as identity, reality, knowledge, and the state of contemporary culture. The playful element, evoked by both playing cards and figures drawn from pop culture, undergoes a gradual shift towards a tragic dimension.