COLLEZIONE GORI

Luigi Mainolfi

Luigi Mainolfi (Rotondi, 1948 – )

The collaboration with Luigi Mainolfi began in 1986 during the period of his first installation for the Gori Collection: the large Serpe, which stands five meters tall and is entirely modeled in terracotta. The artwork was designed for a place that once served as a hay elevator. Following the initial project, there were several others, including terracotta portraits of Pina and Giuliano Gori executed in 1997, the installation Le Ballerine (2002) for the aviary of the Parco dellaPadula, created within the “ScolpireilMarmo” exhibition of the XI International Sculpture Biennial Città di Carrara curated by Giuliano Gori, and the workshop& book A Guardia della Natura (2005) commissioned by Stefania Gori for an art education project for small children.

Upon the painful passing of Pina Gori in 2009, the artist requested to create a monument in her memory: Per quellichevolano consists of a bench intended for Pina’s soul, allowing her to continue watching over her loved ones and the Collection from the heights of the fattoria building. As an interesting fact, the image of the bench is now reproduced on the label of bottles of “Pina,” the rosé wine produced by the Fattoria di Celle.

“As for Luigi Mainolfi, he has taken the initiative to visualize the invasions from outside of that generous but viscous and uncontrollednaturanaturans that buildings would like to exclude, to leave outside the door by establishing a protected space, opportunely disinfected. The forces of nature, though, (whether in the form of vegetal species, parasitic growths, animals or slimy worms), insinuate themselves from outside, they penetrate from below, climbingup the walls of wells, chimneys and narrow pipes. where cleaning and disinfection have a hard time intervening. A beautiful stelein organic-type material (terracotta) rises, thus, in one of those wells, like a mighty Fifth Column of chaos that storms from outside this orderly cosmos, functioning as a useful element of union, reminding us that, between the indoors and outdoors of this original collection exists a calculated syntony.” — Renato Barilli, in Arte Ambientale, Umberto Allemandi & C., Turin, 2008, pp. 17.

Works by the artist

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