Emilio Isgrò. L’opera delle formiche

On May 5th, the MACC – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea del Carmine (Museum of Contemporary Art of Carmine) will open in Scicli, after sixty years of closure and a lengthy and complex restoration, with an extraordinary exhibition by Maestro Emilio Isgrò, titled L’opera delle formiche.

The exhibition, curated by Marco Bazzini and Bruno Corà, is organized and promoted by the Archivio Emilio Isgò and the Municipality of Scicli, and aims to be a comprehensive survey of the artist’s creative journey starting from the 1960s, featuring never-before-seen works that span up to the most recent years of his research.

The exhibition seeks to highlight Isgrò’s close relationship with Mediterranean culture and places a specific focus on the evolution of his “Cancellatura” (“Erasure”), which since the 1990s has also taken on the appearance of bees and ants. The latter are the protagonists of the exhibition’s installation itself, traversing the exhibition space and the square overlooking the museum.

“I am an Italian and Sicilian artist,” says Isgrò, “a citizen of a Europe that needs non-aligned art to make a contribution that is not purely decorative to a world in turmoil. This is why I conceived this Opera delle formiche as a sign of a Sicily that is true to itself but also knows well when the time to change has come. No longer the “prickly” pear or the “opera dei pupi”, no longer Sicilianist rhetoric, but the humble ants that offer their industrious intelligence to support a country that must fully enter Europe if it wants to have any weight.”