At the MAXXI the Architectures of light by Rosa Barba and a focus on Elisabetta Catalano – Rome – Arte.it

Roma – Light, sound, film, language. These are the interconnected elements that guide the MAXXI audience to discover the largest solo exhibition ever in Italy, dedicated to Rosa Barba, an artist from Agrigento who grew up in Germany and a leading protagonist in the contemporary art scene.
The National Museum of Arts of the 21st Century will inaugurate them until March 8 Frame time openedthe journey curated by Francesco Stocchi, who talks about his more than twenty years of research through sculptures and films, as well as two new productions created especially for the project and presented in an absolute preview at the MAXXI. The exhibition, created in close collaboration with the artist, who also designed the exhibition, offers a comprehensive view of his ever-evolving methodology, focusing on the artist’s position as a pioneer in contemporary visual art.
MAXXI, Rosa Barba, Installation | Photo: © Andrea Rossetti

«The MAXXI – said Maria Emanuela Bruni, President of the MAXXI Foundation – was born as an observatory for the present, a place where contemporary language is intertwined with cultural legacies and visions of tomorrow. Rosa Barba’s research perfectly embodies this mission: her works, which build on the film tradition, are real architectures of moving light, capable of exploring time, memory and reality.

As Francesco Stocchi, artistic director and curator of the MAXXI exhibition, also explained: «Frame time opened restores the visionary research of Rosa Barba and transforms the MAXXI into a dynamic landscape in which cinema, sculpture and light redefine the perception of time.
The research of Rosa Barba, whose work departs from historical and socio-cultural research to propose a precise vision of the present, moves between film, literature and science, assessing time as a physical and conceptual matter. Conceived as a three-dimensional pentagram, sensitive to the architecture of the space and displayed on interwoven tracks, the exhibition takes the form of an imposing steel and plexiglass structure that houses 24 works from 2009 to 2025, in a free path with three different access points. Time becomes a circular flow of light and rhythm, while sound emphasizes the synaesthetic dimension of the exhibition. The heart of the project are two new productions. Co-commissioned by MAXXI with CAM – Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian and co-produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film and Hamburger Kunsthalle, Myth and Mercury (2025) is a new 35mm film. Get inspiration from Prison notebooks by Gramsci, Barba views the Mediterranean as an idea in constant transformation. They’re taking all my letters (2025) is instead a kinetic sculpture composed of steel, acrylic, aluminum, LEDs, motors, and 34 vertical strips of 70mm celluloid film in constant motion, with printed words drawn from texts by Susan Howe, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and the artist himself. The sentences, which are constantly transforming, continually generate new language combinations, which weave a reflection on time, on the intermittent light and on the translation of language into images.

Marisa Merz – portrait with Mario, Eliseo Mattiacci and Michelle Coudray, Quadrennial Rome 1973 | Photo by Elisabetta Catalano | With thanks to the MAXXI Foundation

We move to the foyer of Carlo Scarpa where the focus remains until March 8 Elisabetta Catalano. Focus on artists is a tribute to one of the great protagonists of Italian photography. The art of portraiture allowed the Roman photographer who died ten years ago to restore the artistic and cultural climate of her years, capture the protagonists of an era over time and contribute to defining the visual imagination of contemporary art. Characters such as Carla Accardi, Alighiero Boetti, Enzo Cucchi, Francesco Clemente, Michelle Coudray, Gino De Dominicis, Michelangelo Pistoletto have passed through his lens. The Roman Route brings together official portraits and specimens from the Elisabetta Catalano archive and offers a glimpse into her working method. This process creates the frameworks that today belong to the history of contemporary images. As a tribute and a story at the same time, the exhibition becomes a portrait of the photographer as witness and protagonist of the artistic and cultural scene she experienced. The works exhibited in MAXXI become a mosaic of the art world, national and international, from the 1970s to the 2000s. The new acquisitions enrich the core of his works already present in the museum’s heritage. The photographer in the MAXXI Arte Collection is represented by a series of twelve images dedicated to Gilbert & George, four vintage prints donated by the Catalan Archives on the occasion of the Archive Focus 2019 and five author portraits preserved in the Photography Collection of MAXXI Contemporary Architecture and Design.