Le Leggi Dell'Ospitalità

Galleria P420, with The Laws of Hospitality curated by Antonio Grulli, after a program concentrated above all on more historic names, opens its doors to the latest generations of Italian artists.

A group show of young and mid-career artists, linked by birth or by training to the city of Bologna and the surrounding territory. Riccardo Baruzzi, Costanza Candeloro, Giulia Cenci, Cristian Chironi, Eva Marisaldi, Italo Zuffi: six names that span the latest generations in Italy, from those born in the 1960s (Marisaldi and Zuffi) and 1970s (Baruzzi and Chironi) to artists recently emerging from the world of the art academies (Candeloro and Cenci).

For this new line of research, the gallery has decided to start from the city where it operates every day, and which in spite of its size has been one of the liveliest intellectual and artistic scenes in Italy in recent decades. Many of the Italian artists, critics and curators who have emerged over the last few years were trained and took their first steps precisely here in Bologna.

The title The Laws of Hospitality comes from the trilogy written by Pierre Klossowski. It is able to enclose and suggest the works in the show, which range from investigation of the environments and details of everyday life to interpersonal dynamics and the way we are able to communicate with the other-than-us, altering it and being altered, inevitably, every time.

The six artists work with a wide range of different languages: from painting to performance, video to installation, drawing to writing, managing to offer an overview of Bologna and its many different facets. Their connection with the city should not be understood as a demographic relationship. Some were born here, others reside here; some have chosen to study in the city, and then remained; others still have simply passed through, though for a significant period in their life.

What they share is the fact that their research and works have been forcefully influenced by the cultural and artistic scene of Bologna. A territory still capable of conveying a vivid sense of poetics, often leading the artists to share themes, suggestions, references, specific stylistic perspectives or emotional temperatures, making this group of artists extremely compact, although their works – on a superficial level – may at times appear to be completely different and independent.