Rainer - Vedova: Ora.

The catalogue of the exhibition “Rainer - Vedova: Ora.” showcases a selection from the works of two leading protagonists of post-World War II artistic experiment. Rainer and Vedova enjoyed a long friendship and shared a similar conception of art and its value as the lived expression of a responsible relationship with our world. Their story, which traces a powerful and authentic line of thought in postwar artistic exploration, testifies to an alert and sensitive humanity that expresses, through both bodies of work, the fragility of our existence and its beauty as a phenomenon aware of its own imperfection. Vedova belonged to a generation of artists that had inevitably been marked both by the unprecedented demonstration of our potential for evil and by the bloodletting of the Second World War, and by the dangers of passivity in the face of totalitarianism. For Arnulf Rainer, a self-taught painter whose main influences were Surrealism and American Abstract Expressionism, the centre of his artistic enquiry was the cross, for him ‘shorthand for the human face’: “Stand in front of the mirror and observe your face, you will see that a cross is inscribed everywhere within it”.