22/10/19 till 06/01/20
Sublimi Anatomie, is designed to rediscover the cognitive and critical importance of observing the human body, a multimodal practice with a centuries-old history, primarily involving the senses such as sight and touch but also techniques, instruments and technologies. The exhibition will be showcasing a selection of objects and documents of immense historical, art historical and scientific importance illustrating the history both of the observation of the human body and of the human body as observer in the arts and sciences, while also linking up to contemporary artistic research in drawing, sculpture, multimedial art and performance art as it seeks to shed light on the physical and material nature of the body; and all of this, without forgetting the importance of the machines that appear to be able to explore even the body's least visible details and its most complex processes. mehr
Sublimi Anatomie will focus around a reconstruction of the Amphithéâtre de Morphologie in the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris, which hosts a late 18th century anatomy theatre inspired, in its turn, by similar anatomical theatres in Padua (1595) and in Bologna (1637). Thus fitted out, the rotunda in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni will become a fully-fledged workshop for drawing from life, in this case replacing corpses with living models in order to stimulate observation from life as an analytical tool designed to trigger dynamics capable of activating the eye, the hand and the body, and hosting a scientific, socio-anthropological and philosophical debate on the vision and "construction" of the image of the human body. As a venue for gesture and movement, the rotunda will serve both as training ground and as a stage for performances.