Examining the work of Louise Nevelson (Kiev, 1899 – New York, 1988) still means today confronting one of the most powerful reflections on the transformation of matter and being that twentieth-century art has been able to elaborate. The occasion is now in Bologna with a new exhibition, installed at Palazzo Fava and curated by Ilaria Bernardi, which proposes a reading of the artist’s sculptural universe by departing from the usual celebration of assemblage based on a process of repetition to reveal other symbolic and processual stratifications of a research that was highly anticipatory with respect to central questions in contemporary debate: from the ecology of artistic practices to the deconstruction of gender roles, from the phenomenology of perception to the dialectic between margin and center of the art system. The installation unfolds through five thematic nuclei and is based on a methodological deconstruction of the artist’s work that privileges analytical quality over expository quantity: the intent is to create the necessary time and space to highlight the material and conceptual processes underlying each series of works, beyond the canons of generic abstractionism (of which, moreover, Nevelson is considered an undisputed master).
Louise Nevelson, solo show, installation view at Palazzo Fava, Bologna, courtesy Genus Bononiae – Musei della Città
The first room welcomes the visitor with some imposing black self-supporting sculptures, the “Sky Cathedrals” that have consecrated the international fame of the Ukrainian-born American naturalized artist since the 1960s. In these calculated assemblages, fragments of furniture, typographic molds, table legs and frames lose their morphological specificities to converge in a unitary visual grammar. The lead-black patina that uniformly coats each element does not represent a mere formal expedient to favor visual homogeneity, but constitutes the conceptual device through which the artist enacts a sort of contemporary “nigredo”, that is, the first phase of the alchemical process of creating the philosopher’s stone, that of putrefaction and decomposition, in which the various substances are fused in an undifferentiated magma before the final transformation. The materiality of the work thus becomes a manifestation of an alchemical process that, borrowed from esoteric disciplines, is translated into a poetics of identity transformation. The collected elements – chairs, drawers, frames, handles – represent the traditional sign alphabet of female domesticity, but their accumulation responds to an esoteric strategy of subtraction: by separating the recovered materials from their functional identity, Nevelson elevates them to another dimension, where social waste is transfigured into a celebratory monument. Their subsequent recomposition generates architectures that claim public space with the force of ancient totems, while maintaining a persistent reference to domestic intimacy. In this mixture of private and social, the militant nucleus of the artist’s research is revealed: the transformation of object-relics of the domestic sphere into powerful instruments of identity self-affirmation.
Louise Nevelson, solo show, installation view at Palazzo Fava, Bologna, courtesy Genus Bononiae – Musei della Città
The exhibition path continues with the cycle of “Doors,” presented in the second room with four exemplary works that cover a time span of over twenty years. The door, a fundamental iconographic element in the alchemical imagination, is configured as a symbolic threshold between the here of waste and the beyond of artistic transfiguration. The smallest door, made in 1959, probably recovered from the artist’s cellar and minimally modified through the addition of small wooden elements, testifies to the almost casual origin of a series destined to develop in an increasingly complex and structured direction. The later doors of the seventies instead reveal a more stratified compositional process, where domestic elements – chairs, table legs, utensils – are orchestrated in configurations that evoke the symbolic synthesis of the entire dwelling. The third room introduces a further formal modulation, developed by two environmental-scale works characterized by more regular geometry, reduced compositional density and a more marked orientation toward abstraction. Here Nevelson abandons the casual recovery of domestic materials to turn to industrial typographic shelves, creating structures that anticipate the golden phase of her journey. The titles of these works, unlike the usual “Untitled” denominations, bear explicit references to the landscape theme – “Tropical Landscape” (1974) and “City series” (1974) – revealing the artist’s aspiration to a final synthesis between human artifice and cosmic order.
Louise Nevelson, solo show, installation view at Palazzo Fava, Bologna, courtesy Genus Bononiae – Musei della Città
The room dedicated to rare prints documents a lesser-known aspect of her production, the graphic one, where the tension between figuration and abstraction that runs through her entire research emerges with particular evidence. In three precious etchings and drypoint prints (“Archaic Figure”, “Jungles Figures III”, “Magnificent Jungle Cats”, all made in 1953) still pervaded by American expressionist language, one can glimpse anthropomorphic presences – eyes, noses, mouths – that the material stratification of mature works will render increasingly indecipherable. The graphic dimension also reveals the anticipation of that geometrization that will characterize subsequent phases, confirming the coherence of a path evolved through progressive formal purifications. The itinerary concludes in the Carracci room with the hieratic golden sculptures, symbolic vertex of the alchemical process. Here lead is definitively transformed into gold, materializing the achievement of that perfect synthesis between opposites that constituted the ultimate objective of traditional alchemical research. The forms become more recognizable, the compositional elements more defined, while gold confers a sacred dimension that transcends material preciousness to evoke that spiritual light that alchemists associated with the final transformation of matter. Significant is the presence, in this concluding room, of works that juxtapose black with gold, documenting the co-presence of opposites that permeates all of Nevelson’s production. Equally revealing is the inclusion of works that present wood in its natural state alongside golden elements, a conceptual short-circuit that testifies to the achievement of awareness that authentic gold coincides with nature in its immediate manifestation.
Louise Nevelson, solo show, installation view at Palazzo Fava, Bologna, courtesy Genus Bononiae – Musei della Città
As mentioned at the beginning, the ecology of creative practices, the urgency of recycling and reusing materials, the deconstruction of traditional gender identities, the search for new balances between human and natural, are extremely current themes, with respect to which Louise Nevelson was an unconscious pioneer. Animated by the urgency to direct her biographical experience as a woman artist, daughter of an immigrant carpenter, toward redemption and self-realization often precluded in that era to the female universe, Nevelson ends up creating a laboratory of identity experimentation with universal implications, probing with the means of art the invisible process of transformation that runs through every individual and collective existence. The waste materials she recovered and transfigured constitute the concretization of those parts of herself and society that dominant thought relegates to the margins: the feminine, the immigrant, the poor, the domestic. Their elevation to artistic dignity through the alchemical process of assemblage and monochromy represents one of the most powerful metaphors of art’s transformative possibilities that the twentieth century has been able to elaborate. In this perspective, the Bologna exhibition is configured not only as an interesting operation of critical rediscovery, but also as a starting point for reflection on the necessity of new creative paradigms capable of transforming the waste of civilization into seeds of sustainable future.
Info:
Louise Nevelson
30/05/2025 – 20/07/2025
Curated by Ilaria Bernardi, promoted by Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna, Opera Laboratori and Associazione Genesi within the Genus Bononiae project
Palazzo Fava
Via Manzoni, 2 – Bologna
www.genusbononiae.it
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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