Famous sculptors you have never heard of
“Everybody knows the work of Pomodoro, Cavaliere, Consagra, Cascella, Beverly Pepper, and perhaps Ceroli, Pistoletto and Merz; but there is a group of younger sculptors who have aptly represented Italian sculpture on the international scene in the last decade. Giovanni Anselmo, Amalia Del Ponte, Gerardo Di Fiore, Luciano Fabro, Luigi Mainolfi, Giuseppe Maraniello, Hidetoshi Nagasawa, Giuseppe Spagnulo, Mauro Staccioli, Antonio Trotta, Gilberto Zorio. All eleven of them are characterized by a sort of classical measure, and yet they are unruly and unsettling: some of them share a narrative drive, while others have a more sensual, bodily character, both symbolic and biomorphic.
The dense mystery of megalithic monuments is reintroduced in art by Amalia Del Ponte and her Encantar, together with the seductive power of the ideal order of measurement. After Chamber Music for Six Instruments (1980) – wood, alabaster, silver and water – including materials belonging, as noted by Francesco Leonetti, to different specific disciplines and their sources (scientific analysis, psychoanalytical symbolism, eighteenth-century concoctions, Eastern sacred texts), Del Ponte has been moving around in a slightly magical atmosphere.
Order, harmony, symmetry. However, on polished stones and marbles, there is the passage of time, the touch of a human being, the wear of wind and water, percussions and silence”.
Lea Vergine