From October 12 at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, the first comprehensive solo exhibition in Italy dedicated to the artist who challenged perception through geometry and optical illusions.
It is in Venice that artist Marina Apollonio (b. 1940) was “infected by the art virus”. Marina Apollonio, born in Trieste in 1940, arrived in the Lagoon at just eight years old when her father, Umbro, an art scholar and critic, accepted the prestigious position as director of ASAC, a role he held from 1949 to 1972, turning it into one of the most important and essential places for interdisciplinary consultation and archiving of historical artistic materials from the Biennale. These were the years when Peggy Guggenheim was falling in love with the city, surrounding herself with talents to shape and build her collection. Meanwhile, Marina was growing up and taking her first steps as an artist, attending the Academy of Fine Arts; later, she dedicated herself to interior design, drawn to the rigor of mathematics applied to art. She began her research on visual perception in 1962, becoming passionate about the objective language of geometry, with the circle as its highest visual expression. This is where the exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection begins, Marina Apollonio. Beyond the Circle, from October 12 to March 3, 2025, the first comprehensive solo exhibition dedicated to her in Italy, curated by Marianna Gelussi. It presents about a hundred works from the artist’s studio, as well as from national and international museums, including the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome and Turin, the Mart in Rovereto, Germany’s Kunsthalle and Ritter Museum in Waldenbuch, and the French Fondation Villa Datris in l’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue.
The exhibition offers a window into the Optical period that characterized her research from the mid-1960s to the 1970s, amid the flourishing of national and international movements and trends, from Nuova Tendenza 3 in Zagreb to Gruppo N in Padua, Gruppo T in Milan, Gruppo Azimuth, and Gruppo 0 in Düsseldorf. Marina Apollonio closely observed these groups without ever formally joining them, engaging with friends like Getulio Alviani, Dadamaino, Piero Manzoni, and Enrico Castellani, as well as Nanda Vigo and Bruno Munari. They shared a utopian drive, an urgency to transcend reality, not in an informal way but by revolutionizing expressive language, making it objectively tied to the present in a new form of democratization of art. The exhibition traces Apollonio’s various inquiries, from her rigorous execution method to her experimentation with materials that push towards a dynamic perception of space through vision. The circle, the protagonist of her iconic Circular Dynamics series, which she worked on starting in 1963, led her to explore optical structure and mobility. Her early works, such as the Reliefs, appear as metallic structures that open to the surrounding environment with vibrant vitality. The Gradations, elegant paintings created in the late 1960s, develop programmed color in concentric circles, leading to the Color Diffusion Reliefs, painting-reliefs from the early 1970s, and small-format Expansions from the same period, which appear as explosions of color graduated in concentric lines.
For this exhibition, the artist has also created two site-specific works allowing the viewer to “enter the artwork” visually, and, with Endings, even through acoustic perception, thanks to a collaboration with composer Guglielmo Bottin. A tribute that could not be missed for this experimenter, who, in 1968, did not escape the foresight and instinct of Peggy Guggenheim. In fact, Peggy saw her solo exhibition at Galleria Barozzi and commissioned Rilievo 505, a work that remains part of the Guggenheim Collection today— a fluorescent aluminum metal weave with strong visual appeal, much like those sinuous, mobile lines capable of hypnotizing the viewer.
