Ferrara celebrates one of its best-known and most appreciated artists with a solo exhibition entitled Sergio Zanni. Narrative Volumes, organized at the Pavilion of Contemporary Art by the Art Museum Service of the City of Ferrara and the Ferrara Arte Foundation.
Born in 1942, Sergio Zanni trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, initially devoting himself to painting. In the mid-1960s he realized that he was “using color as a support, as a material to finish forms” and thus decided to “turn to sculpture.” The first creations molded in clay were considered by him as mere preparatory works for the subsequent casting in bronze or realization in marble; in time, however, he realized that he had found the material that “suggested and allowed him a personal and complete language”: clay, in fact, “could very well perform the functions of all other materials, but could not be imitated in its unlimited natural preciousness.”
Beginning in the 1980s, the works of Zanni-who, at the same time, teaches at the ” Dosso Dossi” Art Institute in his city (from 1967 to 1995)-appear in numerous group and solo exhibitions in Italy and abroad, establishing him as one of the most significant and original interpreters of contemporary sculpture.
The Ferrara-based artist pursues a highly personal figuration. “My craft,” he says, “allows me constant journeys of discovery of ‘unknown lands,’ which have materialized into a myriad of characters: hermits, rain lords, assassins, war memorials, devils, guardians of the plains, gypsies, watchers, walkers, divers, waiters, figures without front, pilots, cloud hunters, oblomovs, smokers, war painters, mysterious angels, siren songs, equilibrists, wayfarers.”
Many of the unmistakable characters that populate the poetic, imaginative world conceived by Zanni, which he renamed “narrative volumes” for the occasion, that is, concrete figures that impose themselves in space to tell us their story (adventures, myths, dreams, memories, existential conditions…), will land in the halls of the Pavilion of Contemporary Art, where visitors will have the opportunity to see again some of his most famous monumental works – the Kamikaze of 1998; Group Photo and Hourglass of 2004 – made, necessarily, with materials more practical than terracotta, such as fiberglass and polystyrene covered with iron ball.
In addition to the rich selection of small, medium and large sculptures (about 40, including groups and single figures), the exhibition will also feature numerous examples of the artist’s pictorial production, which, in recent times, has dedicated a series of works to a subject as rich in meaning and symbolic implications as the Tree of Knowledge.
Organizers
Art Museum Service of the City of Ferrara and Ferrara Arte Foundation