…and beauty it is!
The concept of beauty changes through time, always evolving and closely connected with conventions and social transformations; as never before, during the ‘900, it was being enriched by so various nuances.
The path proposed by Foundation 107 is a journey into the twentieth century: sculpture,drawing, painting, photography and video take us into territories that medias and everyday life have made to us familiar.
It starts from the opulent beauty, exhibited at the turn of the ‘900, faint memory of the past century. The first stage leads us to Amedeo Modigliani’s work where beauty becomes introspective, an eye looks towards the outside world and the other is turned to our inner.
Andy Warhol chooses to celebrate the stardom, the powerful, bringing out, however, the common man and the outcast; today the myth is still celebrated in his immortality.
The works of Mapplethorpe transformed photography into sculpture and the man and the male sex are their protagonists. The Vitruvian Man is assumed as an icon, but replaced by a coloured model, the exaltation of beauty favours the erotic-sexual element, form is protagonist not the facial features or lineaments.
To affect the twentieth century are the images of movie stars of which we offer a selection of photographs, both from movie set and photographic studio, from Rodolfo Valentino to Dolce Vita, the images of the great stars chase themselves, Greta Garbo, Sofia Loren,
Elizabeth Taylor, Brigitte Bardot are assumed as model by the common man, dream and desire melt.
On March 9, 1959 the first Barbie doll was born, now the world’s most popular one. It’s an icon of childhood, beautiful, blonde and with blue-eyes with perfect features, is the Western world model, the ideal of beauty exported worldwide, closely related to the American dream and object of desire.
…and beauty it is! continues its path with Carlo Mollino and the girl models in Polaroid, with Joel Peter Witkin in whose work death and beauty coexist on the same level and arrives to present day encountering the testings of contemporary artists, more attentive to an ideal of beauty tainted by the experience and from the real, a beauty that sometimes has pathological implications. A model of beauty that in aesthetics has no fear of using a plastic surgeon, and finds sometimes in technology possibilities of alternative routes.
