10 september 2021
Pressure
curated by Umberto Palestrini

The City of Teramo and the Councillor for Culture, Andrea Core, present the Pressure exhibition curated by Umberto Palestini. The exhibition focuses on contemporary art prints produced by the Arti Grafiche della Torre printing house, with artists who have mainly practised the language of painting and sculpture, but have also experimented with engraving and large-format chalcography. The exhibition will present the research of national and international artists, testifying to the vitality of a traditional expressive language, in this case revitalised by a series of idioms of great sign and formal suggestion. The event is particularly interesting in that it demonstrates how the language of graphic art is a precious territory of investigation for contemporary authors. In this case, it is very suggestive to see how a classic practice, involving the precision of the hand, is renewed through the experience of the current chalcographic technique.
Tradition and experimentation are intimately linked, especially when they focus on the large size, as almost all the works on display do.
Thus, we go beyond the usual delimitation of the small format, which had in any case produced the sublime masterpieces of the great masters, in order to courageously tackle the possible pitfalls inherent in works that choose to deal with techniques outside the established standards. The variety of approaches, techniques and formal results achieved, as witnessed by the works on display in the Pressure exhibition, highlight the absolute expressive originality of contemporary graphic art and make the event a significant focus for a very topical debate.
The invited artists who have collaborated with the main protagonists of the Printworks are very significant, including: Sandro Chia; Eliseo Mattiacci; historic masters such as Diego Esposito, Walter Valentini and Giuliano Vangi; foreign authors such as Fathi Hassan, and Jonathan Guaitamacchi; undisputed artists such as Gian Marco Montesano, Omar Galliani and Luca Pignatelli; authors of the latest generations of absolute value such as Fabrizio Cotognini and Matteo Fato.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a video presentation of Luca Bellandi’s monotype technique.