The Galleria Civica is devoting an exhibition to the Bertozzi & Casoni collective. In 1980 Giampaolo Bertozzi and Stefano Dal Monte Casoni founded Bertozzi & Casoni, a ceramic sculpture business in Imola.

As leading experimenters and artists of international renown, they represent a distorted reality by focusing on discarded or secondary elements. The material is used to create cognitive short circuits and to suggest new interpretations of social, cultural, economic and political phenomena. With veiled irony, Bertozzi & Casoni's work is disruptive, provoking shifts in meaning and confusion between sign and appearance. In a galaxy of rubbish and surplus, Bertozzi & Casoni meditate on the major themes of contemporary society: from climate change to migration, from consumerism to the destruction of biodiversity.

In an exhibition between irony and social investigation, four monographic sections on Bertozzi & Casoni are intertwined with four thematic pairings where the ceramists' work is set against a careful selection of pieces by great masters from the Mart's collections. The first comparison involves Lucio Fontana and Fausto Melotti in a reflection on ceramics as a medium: no longer a minor discipline belonging to the ornamental arts but, at last, painted sculpture, suitable for contemporary forms of experimentation. The protagonist of the second comparison is Giorgio Morandi, to whom Bertozzi & Casoni dedicate a cycle of works. Then we come to photography, a language represented by artists Thomas Demand and Clegg & Guttmann, who capture slices of everyday reality in their shots. The last pairing is with Trentino architect Adalberto Libera, one of the leading exponents of Italian Rationalism, to whom the Mart dedicated an important exhibition in 2013. Bertozzi & Casoni selected two of the architect's paintings, which inspired two site-specific works – tributes celebrating Libera and the Mart Collections.

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