Elisabetta Benassi “Lady and Gentleman”

Elisabetta Benassi’s work is nourished by a continuous dialogue with the past and with current events. Through research that leads her to explore archives or sound out traces of more or less well-known events, the artist rediscovers moments and figures from the twentieth century that are still capable of questioning the present.

This new exhibition project, curated by Gabi Scardi and conceived specifically for the residence that was originally owned by Renzo Bongiovanni Radice and then by Adolfo Pini, focuses on the figure of the Turinese gallery owner Luciano Anselmino, a now-forgotten figure who animated the art scene between Rome and Milan in the 1960s and 1970s: the same years in which the Milanese palazzo in Corso Garibaldi passed from Renzo Bongiovanni Radice, a shy and very reserved painter, who devoted his entire life to painting with a personal and introspective gaze, to his nephew Adolfo Pini, bon vivant, responsible for the testamentary legacy thanks to which the Adolfo Pini Foundation still exists today. In those years, Italy was experiencing an international cultural ferment in which the impetuous activity of Anselmino, friend and companion of the great artists of his time, from Man Ray to Andy Warhol, fitted in perfectly.

The show features a series of objects, some of which are taken from reality, others recreated on the basis of archival finds; all interpreted as fulcrums of a broader web of historical and cultural references. Through them Benassi, in a dry style, refers to the figure of Anselmino, to the extraordinary artistic encounters he triggered in the very short span of his activity, and to his premature and sudden death.