The new section that will enhance the Modern hall: it will present four works by Italian historic artists, Ugo La Pietra, Marina Apollonio, Nanda Vigo, Luciano Fabro, conceived as full-immersion settings and rooms capable of creating innovative application models of use and offering visitors an unprecedented viewing experience.

Marina Apollonio

Spazio ad Attivazione Cinetica 6B, 1967-2022

Courtesy of the artist

A representative figure of the international optical-kinetic movement, Marina Apollonio (Trieste, 1940) began her research into perception and visual communication in the early 1960s, moving towards depersonalized art, as opposed to the concept of expressive abstraction. She shared ideas with Getulio Alviani, Dadamaino and other exponents of Azimuth; she was involved in Group N in Padua and Group T in Milan, sharing both the research intention and the choice of modern industrial materials to create structures calculated in such a way as to transform themselves into space. In Spazio ad Attivazione Cinetica 6B, one of her works with the most evident full-immersion component, the starting point is the circle. The artist elaborates a pattern of mathematically calculated black and white lines to create a programmed space capable of virtually activating perception of phenomena that restrict and expand form. The artist has created a composition of decentralized concentric circles on the floor of a room with dark walls. On walking across this floor, the circles seem to oscillate and spiral with dizzying optical effects. A full physical and mental immersion, requiring visitors to abandon their senses completely and accept the spatial dimension recreated by the patterns of optical deception and perception games.

Luciano Fabro

Nord Sud Est Ovest giocano a Shanghai, 1989 - 1994

Courtesy - Christian Stein Gallery & Luciano and Carla Fabro Archive, Milan

Since the mid-1960s, with works such as in Cubo (1966) and Space Concept (1967), Luciano Fabro's research (Turin, 1936 - Milan, 2007) also found expression through spatial environments that invite visitors not only to observe the work but to modify it through their presence and behaviour.

As evidenced in a conversation with his daughter, Silvia, the work Nord Sud Est Ovest giocano a Shanghai is a structure suspended from the ceiling by four wires which are as invisible as possible. This quadrilateral is painted on each face of the square pipe with colours corresponding with those used by Mondrian in his paintings (red, blue…). Small aluminium pipes having the same colours are placed on top and linked two by two to form a free grid above the structure. The small Nudes are held to the structure by wires passing between the bar and the rod to form a cobweb with a continuous thread and suspended at different heights that match the average height of people: from 190 to 160 cm. They populate a square and seem to be having a conversation.

The image lies between the free and the geometric, recalling the Shanghai game. As Fabro himself said: "Another meaning was the purpose of the game of Shanghai, which is always linked to one of the recurring elements in my work... which is playing with random chance."

Ugo La Pietra

Immersione nella luce, 1969-2016

Courtesy of the artist & the MA*GA Museum, Gallarate (VA)

Artist, architect and designer - Ugo La Pietra (Bussi sul Tirino, 1938) lives and works in Milan. As long ago as 1962 his career developed towards clarification and definition of the relationship between individuals and the environment. At the beginning of this work process, he created knowledge tools designed to transform the conventional work of art-spectator relationship. He worked inside and outside disciplines, always declaring himself to be a “researcher in the visual arts”.

Immersione nella luce is part of the larger and more pioneering full-immersion project begun in the 1960s, a series of full-immersion installations simulating certain natural elements that isolate observes within them. The environmental object placed in the centre of the room invites visitors to poke their heads inside the cockpit and be immersed in light. As the artist himself said, this work is: "An invitation to leave reality behind and seek refuge in a kind of privacy in separation that is also a means to verify the potential for intervening within reality itself, through elements of rupture that displace the terms codified by tradition."

Nanda Vigo

Genesis Light, ANNO

Courtesy Nanda Vigo Archive, Milan

After opening her studio in Milan in 1959, the essential theme of Nanda Vigo's art (Milan, 1936-2020) is the conflict/harmony between light, space and time, which the artist used in her work, even as an architect and designer, in the search of total and full-immersion experiences.

After spending time with the studio of Lucio Fontana, with whom she designed the Utopie environment in 1964, and having become involved with the artists who founded the Azimut Gallery in Milan, Vigo met the artists and venues of the ZERO movement in Germany, Holland and France, thereafter becoming the driving force behind many international relationships between groups of artists.

Genesis Light by Nanda Vigo (Milan, 1936-2020): these circles of black crystal and saturated blue and/or red light are among the most "environmental" and "architectural" works in Nanda Vigo's career yet at the same time also have a strong connection with the research begun in the 1960s. Just like Ambiente Cronotopico (1968), Genesis Light also shares the characteristic of interacting with the surrounding space, modifying and altering it in order to reach "other" distant, esoteric and spatial "knowledge".

All of Nanda Vigo's works are interstellar journeys!