AURELIO AMENDOLA, AN ANTHOLOGICAL EXHIBITION IN PISTOIA - GREETINGS FROM LEO-LEV

The Fondazione Pistoia Musei – from 8 February to 25 July 2021 – is staging in its venues of Palazzo Buontalenti and the Antico Palazzo dei Vescovi the event AURELIO AMENDOLA | Un’antologica. Michelangelo, Burri, Warhol and others, curated by Paola Goretti and Marco Meneguzzo.

While waiting for the new government directives on the closure of museums and cultural activities, the Leo-Lev Exhibition Centre is delighted to welcome this Pistoiese event in which Beauty is recounted in over two hundred images by Aurelio Amendola.

As the texts accompanying the anthological exhibition illustrate, Aurelio Amendola, a skilful experimenter in unusual juxtapositions between the Ancient and the Contemporary, is one of the most elegant and prolific photographers of our time: his images have a strength that is millions of years old and, at the same time, convey pure grace and melody.

The Fondazione Pistoia Musei exhibition is a tribute to the career of an artist of great intensity, capable of transforming natural elements into metaphors of sensuality and carnality, firmly anchored in the Tuscan cultural context and in Pistoia in particular, and yet not only an artist of the genius loci but an interpreter of universal creativity.

From the official website of Fondazione Pistoia Musei, AURELIO AMENDOLA | An anthology. Michelangelo, Burri, Warhol and the others is divided into two large parts – Ancient and Contemporary – linked by continuous figurative cross-references, covering over 60 years of activity and all the genres in which the author has experimented, explored in specific sections of the exhibition.

This is the first exhibition to bring together almost all of Amendola’s production, offering the public the opportunity to admire his figurative consistency, his links with the classical tradition, with the history of art and photography, and with the great contemporary masters. Photographer of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Uffizi, the Vatican Museums, FMR magazine, the Vittoriale degli Italiani, and numerous other national and international museums, and linked to many 20th century artists, Aurelio Amendola is a world-famous author whose photography is not reduced to a simple reproduction, but is similar to sculptural practice, to its plastic harmony: it is volume and sensuality.

An interpreter par excellence of Michelangelo’s work, a sublime witness of the ancient world in his shots of Canova, Bernini, Jacopo della Quercia, Donatello and Giovanni Pisano, and of the contemporary with his portraits of Burri, de Chirico, Warhol, Manzù, Vedova, Ceroli, Lichtenstein, Kounellis and many others, Amendola has been able to dialogue with the spirit of the artists, restoring their style and intensity. Far from the documentary model, with the special grace of the atmospheric and sensorial quality of his shots, Aurelio Amendola’s photography is never an aesthetic object but a poetic act, at once carnal and spiritual, meditative and seductive.

Regretting the postponement of the vernissage of this splendid initiative, we hope that Aurelio Amendola’s anthological exhibition in Pistoia, as well as the Leo-Lev exhibition programme, can resume as soon as possible.