Turi Simeti: the Catalogue Raisonné

Presented on the 5th December 2017, in the framework of Palazzo Reale (Milan), the Turi Simeti’s catalogue raisonné is a unique publication curated by Antonio Addamiano and Federico Sardella, published by Skira. The catalogue is divided into parts: the first one filled with hitherto unseen photographs and exclusive contents, and a second one with all the artworks dated between 1961 and 2017.

The press conference of the Turi Simeti’s catalogue raisonné, held at Palazzo Reale on the 5th December 2017, saw the curators of the volume as protagonists, along with the director of the venue, Domenico Piraina, the Prof. Francesco Tedeschi (History of Contemporary Art, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan) and the curator and art critic Natacha Carron as moderator, and, above all, the artist himself: Turi Simeti.

Curated by the Archive Turi Simeti, the catalogue raisonné is bilingual and conceived with the direct collaboration of the artist and the supervision of Essila Burello: it offers a report on over fifty years of work, including almost two thousand works on canvas created starting in 1960.

The First Volume is an extensive monograph illustrates both the works and the installations, along with numerous unpublished documents and photographs of the personal and collective exhibitions, as well as offering a series of detailed information regarding the artist enriched by a critical anthology that includes the main texts dedicated to Simeti.

The Second Volume, organized in a chronological sense as the first one, illustrates the one thousand nine-hundred-three artworks created between 1960 and 2016, each accompanied by a card with the characteristics of the works and information relating to the exhibition and bibliographic path.

The artist Turi Simeti was born in Alcamo (TP) in 1929, lives and works in Milan.

In 1958 he moved to Rome, where he began his first contacts with the art world. Thanks to short stays in London, Paris, Basel and New York, he encountered the artistic avant-garde of the time and moving in harmony with the rampant desire to eliminate tradition and preconceived codes. Within this aspiration, his language becomes recognizable through the use of monochrome and relief as the only compositional procedure. He thus compares the figure of ellipse, destined to become the iconic figure of his poetics and the form that emblematically expresses the feeling around which, even today, his creative process is exchanged and unfolded.

His works are in important public and private collections all over the world, among which are to remember: GNAM, National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome; MARCA, Museo delle Arti di, Catanzaro; Museo del Novecento, Milan; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, Turin; Museion - Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Bolzano; Civic Museum of Contemporary Art Ludovico Corrao, Gibellina; Sammlung Lenz Schönberg, Söll; Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro; Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg, Denmark; Mittelrhein-Museum, Koblenz, Germany; Museum Pfalzgalerie, Kaiserslautern, Germany; Museum Ritter, Waldenbuch, Germany; Kunstmuseum Villa Zanders, Bergisch Gladbach, Germany; The Schaufler Foundation, Sindelfingen, Germany; Städtische Kunstmuseum, Gelsenkirchen, Germany; Croix-Rouge Monégasque, Montecarlo; Voorlinden Museum, Wassenar, Netherlands; Fondazione Ghisla Art Collection, Locarno; Fundación Pablo Atchugarry, El Chorro, Maldonado, Uruguay.