Ettore Spalletti

This summer, the celebrated Italian artist, Ettore Spalletti, has created a new installation for the galleries of the Henry Moore Institute. This is the first UK showing of Spalletti’s work for over a decade and introduces the extraordinary luminosity and mystery of his art to a new generation. Featuring carefully selected pieces from the last twenty-five years, this installation has been designed to maximise the impact of Spalletti’s work and the experience of the galleries themselves.

The exhibition is primarily wall-based and uses the different scale and illumination of our three principal galleries to offer different light sensations. The triple-height top-lit main gallery is made over to the experience of azure - the noontime sky - as ‘caught’ by the painter, while the works in the galleries at either side bracket the azure with more sombre tones of grey. The effect of the display is spare but all-embracing. The works in the main gallery are subject to changing light while the works in the side galleries - which are lit artificially - are effectively frozen in time.

Spalletti produces work that lies between painting and sculpture, working on shaped grounds and supports with a loose and living surface of coloured pigment. The surfaces themselves appear to move and flicker, refusing to settle down, while the ‘canvases’ seem to pull away from the walls of the gallery. What is fixed, pulses with movement of different kinds - more or less physical, more or less visual - and what may seem restrained and ‘minimal’ is soon seen to be richly informed by human experience.

Ettore Spalletti has always lived and worked near Pescara, on the Adriatic coast of Italy, and rarely travels abroad. However, his works have been widely seen internationally, and were included in Documentas 7 and 9, Chambres d’amis, and Skulpture Projekt in Münster. He has also, more recently, been awarded commissions to design permanent public works, including a memorial chapel in France and a fountain in Pescara.

Ettore Spalletti