Exhibition project Luigi Ontani. Le Ore

A project by MAXXI Med and Taobuk Festival
in collaboration with the City of Taormina, Enel and
Oelle Mediterraneo Antico Foundation.

The collaboration between Taobuk and the MAXXI National Museum of Arts of the XXI century with a new exhibition project is renewed this year. Palazzo Corvaja hosts, from the MAXXI Collection, The Hours by Luigi Ontani (1975). The project is part of the activities of MAXXI Med, the nascent cultural center of MAXXI in Messina, which realizes here its first exhibition in Sicily. The work on display is among the highest expressions of fantastic fertility by Luigi Ontani. The explicit reference to the day’s scan reflects the perpetual movement of time. The artist, protagonist in each of the 24 photographic prints that make up the work, manifests himself under multiple identities, each characterized by well-defined attributes and compositions. Ontani embarks on a fascinating iconographic journey, nomadic, through a series of masquerades, unmasking and disguises.

Luigi Ontani. Le Ore, 1975 (dettaglio) MAXXI – Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Roma Courtesy Fondazione MAXXI

The art of Luigi Ontani shines with a deep autobiography and a continuous self-referentiality, which, paradoxically, in a continuous mirror, generates an infinity of identity. And identity, the theme of this new edition of the Festival, is also at the center of the research of MAXXI Med, which focuses on the Mare Nostrum adopting a vision that recognizes the plurality: therefore the identities of the “Mediterranean”.