Four unmissable art exhibits in Rome

Alex Israel finds his way to Rome

“The gallery has always struck me as the perfect space for showing sculpture. It’s also kind of shaped like a board,” says Alex Israel of the cavernous oval volume that is Gagosian’s Rome outpost, a former bank just north of the Trevi Fountain. His upcoming exhibition, which opens on 12 May, is one of the city’s most anticipated: he spoke to HTSI ahead of its installation about FINS, a sculpture series of monumental surfboard fins, fashioned from acrylic plastic at a specialist atelier on the outskirts of the city.

Israel has form with surf culture in the arc of his work, which tends to the thematically discursive: “I started to touch on [surf culture] as a sort of cypher for California culture really early on. And then everything I do comes out of the previous thing; it’s a constant narrative,” he says, citing numerous precedents to these works, among them his wave paintings series and SPF-18, the 2017 feature film he directed about teen surf culture in his hometown of Los Angeles.

A total of seven sculptures, some as tall as 14 feet, range – just like real surfboards – in colour and grades of transparency: some are matte, some frosted, some glossy. They will be grouped, he says, “like a pod, through which the viewer will navigate. From one angle they’ll all look like zippers, like thin vertical lines, but once you move around them and see them in profile, the form will emerge. “I chose the fin because it has all these formal properties I love,” he says. “It recalls modernist sculpture, in its smooth and perfect form; but it’s also a symbol or a metaphor for movement and direction, and for our connection to nature. It was both a shape and a meaning that I responded to.” Chances are his fans will too. FINS is showing at Gagosian Rome from 12 May to 28 July, gagosian.com

Giuseppe Penone’s wow factor at the Galleria Borghese

The elemental force of Giuseppe Penone’s sculptures made him a hero of Italy’s 20th-century arte povera movement: carved in wood or cast in bronze, they are raw, dynamic interrogations of, and odes to, nature and matter.

Until the end of May, you can admire more than 30 of them in a spectacular dialogue with another master of his own era, the early Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Giuseppe Penone: Gesti Universali sees Penone’s works, dating from the 1970s to the early 2000s, spread across several rooms and two gardens at the Galleria Borghese, which houses some of Bernini’s best-known work. In the rooms dedicated to Bernini’s Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanius (1619) and Apollo and Daphne (1622-25), Penone’s monumental renderings create jarring juxtapositions; the effect of the divergent interpretations of physical fragility and mortality, separated by 400 years, is extraordinary.

Mounds of bay leaves, hollow tree trunks, slim skeletal branches – some real, carved or wood, others cast in various metals – make the conventional walk through this most Roman of galleries a surreal, unforgettable experience. Giuseppe Penone: Gesti Universali is showing at the Galleria Borghese until 28 May, galleriaborghese.beniculturali.it

In praise of Pistoletto

Across town and a stone’s throw from the Piazza Navona, the arte povera movement’s founding father is having his own retrospective, in one of Rome’s smaller venues – and a personal favourite of mine – the Chiostro del Bramante. Michelangelo Pistoletto, who turns 90 this year, forged a career in the 1960s with his famous mirror paintings series, which draw the observer into the artwork itself.

The show, which opened in mid-March, is called Infinity: Contemporary Art Without Limits – one of three Italian exhibitions dedicated to the artist this year (the second is currently on at Milan’s Palazzo Reale; a third will open in October at Castello di Rivoli, near Turin).

It brings together more than 50 works, spanning from those 1960s origins to the present day. Expect abundances of neon, glass and steel in various thought-provoking combinations, as well as the prosaic jetsam of everyday life, as with his famous Venere degli Stracci (“Venus of the Rags”), which marries the elegance of an early-19th-century marble – in this case, Bertel Thorvaldsen’s Venus with the Apple (Musée du Louvre) – with a great pile of cast-off textiles. Infinity: Contemporary Art Without Limits is showing at Chiostro del Bramante until 15 October, chiostrodelbramante.it

Margate’s finest at Galleria Lorcan O’Neill

If you’ve read about Tracey Emin recently, it was almost certainly in the context of her hometown of Margate, where alongside her eponymous Foundation she recently inaugurated TKE Studios and TEAR, the Tracey Emin Artist Residency.

But to mark the first exhibition of her own work since she was treated for cancer in 2020, she has chosen Rome, and the centro storico venue of her gallerist and friend Lorcan O’Neill. The works gathered for You Should Have Saved Me, which opens on 13 May, are all new; most of them – gouaches on paper and paintings – were produced expressly for the show. The studies of the female form, among which are many nude self-portraits, are extraordinarily personal works, radiating both formal heft and profound feeling. They confront, provoke and move the viewer with their frankness and vulnerability – naked, in every sense of the word. You Should Have Saved Me is showing at Galleria Lorcan O’Neill until 9 September, lorcanoneill.com