Shilpa Gupta & Marisa Merz: visibileinvisibile: MAXXI L'Aquila, Italy

The duo solo show visibileinvisible, whose title is inspired by the unfinished text by Maurice Merleau-Ponty The Visible and the Invisible, features two key figures on the international art scene: Marisa Merz and Shilpa Gupta.

The exhibition, under the artistic direction of Bartolomeo Pietromarchi and the curatorship of Fanny Borel, showcases the work of two artists, creating a dialogue between two worlds - the East and the West - between two stories, between different generations. The show is a conversation about visibility and invisibility, the image and the word, the political and the philosophical, while the pieces mutually charge one another with ethical and poetic tension and complete each other.

Merleau-Ponty wrote: "Nothing, no side of a thing, shows itself except by actively hiding the others, denouncing them in the act of concealing them. To see is as a matter of principle to see farther than one sees, to reach a latent existence. The invisible is the outline and the depth of the visible."

Gupta's works on poets who were banished and exiled to prevent them from speaking, on invisible borders and definitions that limit individual freedom which are implied but never obvious along with the angels and subtle themes that surface like absent presences in Merz's works together form an intense, pregnant dialog about what it means to see and show, on our relationship with being, addressed by two cultures that are so deeply different yet in dialog. Through painting, and by extension through art, these two artists deeply explore the enigma of "seeing", which Western culture prioritizes, and "feeling", which Eastern culture prioritizes, far more deeply than any other means of perception, inspiring us to reconsider the basic assumptions these two cultures are founded on.

In relation to the context and their host city, these two artists activate paths that open freely into other places and times and end in the here and now, with their essential, necessary and unavoidable presence.

Installation view, Shilpa Gupta,visibileinvisibile, MAXXI L'Aquila, Italy, Photo by Claudio Cerasoli, courtesy MAXXI L'Aquila