Curator Talk with Francesco Guzzetti, Facing America: Mario Schifano, 1960–65

 

February 11, 2021

What did artists growing up in Rome in the 1950s and 1960s think about, when they thought about America? Such a key subject in Italian postwar and contemporary art can be articulated by looking at the early life and practice of Mario Schifano, one of the most relevant representatives of the new generation of artists rising in Rome at the end of the 1950s. Francesco Guzzetti will expand on the relationship between the painter and American art and culture between 1960 and 1965. Ideally walking through the exhibition, the major figures and moments which the American connections of Schifano revolved around will be taken into consideration vis-à-vis the evolution of the artist’s distinctive style and figurative interests.

 

Francesco Guzzetti, PhD, is the curator of the exhibition Facing America: Mario Schifano 1960-1965, currently on view at the Center for Italian Modern Art in New York (Jan. 26-Jun. 5, 2021). Dr. Guzzetti holds a doctoral degree in History of Modern and Contemporary Art from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. His field of expertise is postwar and contemporary Italian art, with special focus on its connections with international tendencies in the 1960s and the 1970s. Dr. Guzzetti’s research has been supported by various pre and post-doctoral fellowships and grants by institutions such as CUNY Graduate Center and the Center for Italian Modern Art in New York; Centre Pompidou in Paris; Harvard University; and Magazzino Italian Art Foundation in Cold Spring, New York. More recently, he was the 2019–20 Postdoctoral Fellow at the Drawing Institute at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. He has curated exhibitions and published essays on numerous subjects in the history of modern and contemporary art. He is the author of the book Ennio Morlotti e l’arte a Milano 1937-1953 (Milan: Scalpendi Editore, 2020) and is currently working on a publication about the connections between American and Italian art in the early 1970s.