Bologna 10 + 1

"Bologna 10 + 1"

from Tuesday, September 17, 2024 to Sunday, November 3, 2024

MAMbo - Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, Italy.

Settore Musei Civici Bologna's MAMbo - Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna presents the exhibition Paolo Ventura. Bologna 10 + 1, which can be visited in the museum foyer from September 17 to November 3, 2024.

Bologna 10 + 1 is Paolo Ventura's new work dedicated to the city, which has its origins in the previous project "Milano Per Filo e per Segno", an exhibition held at the Weinstein Hammons Gallery in Minneapolis in 2023 and for which a book of the same name was published (Danilo Montanari Editore, 2023).

In Bologna 10 + 1, Paolo Ventura pays homage to the city of Bologna. His artistic process begins with a photograph printed on several panels sewn together, on which Ventura uses paint to omit and highlight images, creating bare urban landscapes that evoke surprise and nostalgia.


The artist's fascination with architectural forms stripped of their past, present in the backgrounds of his "Short Stories" (2016), in this case, as already in "Milano Per Filo e per Segno" and even earlier in "La città infinita" (2012), with the removal of superimpositions goes beyond the dreamlike to linger on the dimension of the solid understood as a geometric figure. The urban landscapes depicted, reduced to a minimum and devoid of public participation, lose both opulence and drama; they send no signals or messages of any kind, but simply recover the idea of play, of montage boxes, of a place where the viewer, in retrospect, can imagine and picture the scenarios he or she prefers.



Paolo Ventura's Bologna concedes little or nothing to stereotypes about the city, it does not manifest itself through its symbolic places, and when this rarely happens, architectural contexts are transfigured, losing their immediate recognition.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication of the same name (Danilo Montanari Editore, 2024) with a note by Giovanna Pesci, limited edition of 300 copies.