Re-membering Turi Simeti

Almost a year after the death of the artist Turi Simeti, the Turi Simeti Archive Foundation was set up in Milan at the request of the artist’s family. The mission, in continuity with the existing Archive, will consist of promoting the work of the painter of Sicilian origin, who moved to Milan in the mid-1960s.
The Archive will propose initiatives and projects including exhibitions and catalogues, but will also invite young artists to dialogue with Simeti’s work, with the aim of bringing the new generations closer to one of the protagonists of Italian post-war abstraction.

A photographic project by Giovanna Silva opens the programme. The gallery of the artist’s daughter, Martina Simeti, will host the exhibition in her space in Via Benedetto Marcello 44 in Milan, from 24 February to 19 March 2022.

Giovanna Silva visited Turi Simeti’s studio shortly after his death. The photos were taken on different occasions, close together. A hundred or so shots offer a look at the details. Each shot is repeated, with a tiny imperceptible difference from the previous one, as if each immersion in this space allowed a different level of insight, a discovery that is new each time. There are no unitary visions, but dense details of the story. “It was more than diving into a studio. It’s a house, a work and a life”.
What emerges is a collage of often similar fragments, images that reproduce the space through the pieces of those who lived it, Turi Simeti with his partner Essila Burello, who was also taken away by the pandemic shortly after the artist.

The installation has been conceived and realised with the technical support of architect Luciano Giorgi (LGB architetti), also the author of the project for the Martina Simeti gallery spaces.