The Sir Denis Mahon Foundation was delighted that the the Pinacoteca Civica di Cento reopened on 25 November 2023, following its closure due to a devastating earthquake in 2012.

The reopening was marked by a Guercino Conference with distinguished speakers and scholars, amongst whom Prof David Ekserdjian, who represented the Sir Denis Mahon Foundation, and Prof David Stone.

Our collaborator Francesco Gonzales, also amongst the speakers, spoke about the fascinating story of “St Francis Recovered”, a lost masterpiece by Guercino which was the subject of an exhibition organised by Sir Denis and the Diocese of Novara in 2006.

Dr Tony Hughes is a long-established Harley Street doctor with wide interests. He is an artist, singer, poet and performer. Amongst  his most striking works is this still life with bottles, inspired by the work of Giorgio Morandi. The bottles are shown from a high angle, with a slightly troublesome disjunction between objects and surface that makes them difficult to reconcile on a single plain, drawing the viewer into the work. Unlike the chalky hues of Morandi’s work, these bottles emanate a striking vibrancy in their rich blue.

From Thursday July 27th to Tuesday August 1st, the Burnham Overy Boathouse will be exhibiting The Norfolk Collection works by Dr Tony Hughes. He describes the majority of his work as ‘abstracted landscapes’, rooted in direct observation with interventions in geometry and colour that stretch the work beyond simple representation.

Dr Tony Hughes Artist — Burnham Overy Boathouse

Gabriella Johnson, Ph.D. Candidate in Art History (advisor Professor Emeritus David M. Stone) has won the Samuel H. Kress Foundation/Marian and Andrew Heiskell Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the American Academy in Rome for 2023-2024. This highly competitive fellowship will support research for Johnson’s dissertation, “Galatea’s Realm: The Art of Coral, Shells, and Marine Fossils in Early Modern Sicily, Naples, and the Maltese Islands.” Using methods from material culture studies, the environmental humanities, and the history of science, her project investigates how the sea impacted artistic production in the western Mediterranean world. Johnson’s chapters analyze Sicilian coral’s adoption as a symbol of empire for Habsburg Spain, water’s role in Catholic miracles and superstition, how the sea was woven into the fabric of Neapolitan cultural identity, and the development of marine paleontology through scientific illustration.

Johnson has a Bachelor’s in Art History and Italian Studies from Colby College and a Master’s in Art History from the University of Delaware. In 2020, she received the Sir Denis Mahon Essay Prize for her paper “The Elephant in the Room: Simon Vouet’s Catoptric Elephant, Originality, and the Magic of Optics.” She has held several fellowships from the University of Delaware’s Graduate College and Center for Material Culture Studies. Johnson is currently a Fellow (2022-2023) in Naples, Italy, at the Center for the Art and Architectural History of Port Cities – a research residency supported by the University of Texas, Dallas, and the Museo di Capodimonte. The Center, or “La Capraia” (nicknamed as such because the Center is housed in an eighteenth-century goat manger in the Real Bosco di Capodimonte), supports nine months of onsite research in Naples for advanced pre-doctoral students. Johnson is conducting research in specialized libraries, archives, and art collections to study Neapolitan marine-themed still life painting alongside developments in early modern gastronomy, music history, folklore, and medicine.

Next year, at the American Academy, Johnson will research how empiricism and artistic visuality converged to create a more nuanced understanding of aquatic nature and geological thought. Her primary case study is a treatise written by artist and amateur naturalist Agostino Scilla, who was among the first in the western world to publish that fossils are the petrified remains of once-living, ancient creatures. Scilla illustrated his treatise with specimens from his own collection that were retrieved from eastern Sicily, Calabria, and the Maltese Islands. Using specialized libraries and collections in Rome, Johnson will put Scilla’s treatise in dialogue with his surviving artistic output to understand how artistic practice, scientific discovery, and wonder were entwined in the seventeenth century.

The American Academy in Rome is a leading American overseas center for independent studies and advanced research in the fine arts and humanities. With an acceptance rate of 3.6 percent, the Rome Prize is one of the most prestigious fellowships in the arts and humanities. From an international pool of 988 applicants, only 36 were awarded Rome Prize fellowships this year. Each winner receives the gift of “time and space to think and work” in the form of a stipend, workspace, and room and board at the Academy’s eleven-acre campus on the Janiculum Hill in Rome starting in September 2023.

In February 2017, Massimo Pulini found in a Franciscan church in Aversa an altarpiece depicting an Assumption of the Virgin that the scholar attributed to Guercino, after having identified it with the one the artist from Cento executed in 1650 and noted in his Libro dei Conti, in two passages that refer precisely to the Neapolitan area.

In addition to arousing interest in the field of art historical studies, the news attracted particular attention in the media world, inspiring a beautiful documentary (by Adolfo Conti and Eugenio Persico) Il Guercino ritrovato (“The rediscovered Guercino”),  shown on Sky Arte in 2019, which was supported by the Associazione Imprenditori Centesi per la Cultura, The Sir Denis Mahon Foundation, the Fava and Fantozzi companies, and was sponsored by the Municipality of Cento, the Municipality of Aversa and the Centro Studi Internazionale Il Guercino.

That discovery reopened a debate, almost as if it was a cold case, which led to the new temporal collocation of another painting by Guercino, now in Detroit, but which for many decades has been considered the work done in 1650 for a Neapolitan church.

After the restoration of the painting, the whole story of studies and discoveries was published in a book, edited by Massimo Pulini himself, together with Alessandra Sgueglia, and with important contributions from Emilia D’Ettore and Enrico Ghetti. Promoted and published by the Grafica Nappa editions of Aversa, the volume is presented for the first time in Cento, the birthplace of the artist himself.

Each painting by Giovan Francesco Barbieri that resurfaces becomes a reason for reflections and considerations that each time adds elements of knowledge and understanding of the artistic context in which the great artist worked. This story starts from the Bologna workshop, immediately after the death of his beloved younger brother Paolo Antonio, passes through Cesena and Cortona, through agents who will pay for the painting by proxy and will take it to the Clarisse church in Aversa, where it will always remain on display, however losing memory of its author.

Many fine compendiums of research are derived from many years of planning, from the meticulous coordination of the finest scholars to turn a subject inside out. And then there are those in which strands of contemporary scholarly discourse converge in a single volume. The latter describes this study, in which the stars have aligned to facilitate a heretofore unparalleled investigation into the work of Guercino’s at the Villa Ludovisi in Rome.

The collection begins with Alessandro Zuccari’s appraisal of the wall paintings in the Villa, written between 2018 and 2019 at the request of the Court of Rome. This study turns the spotlight on Guercino’s wall decorations: their uniqueness, their intrinsic historical and artistic value.

This acts as a preamble to new research, namely the technical imaging of Guercino’s Aurora and Dawn, Honour, and Virtue, which adorn the two main halls of the Villa, coordinated by Barbara Ghelfi as part of the project: ‘Guercino Beyond Colour’. This was undertaken with the help of Princess Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi, in collaboration with the diagnostic laboratory at the Cultural Heritage Department of the University of Bologna.

On the basis of this diagnostic research, it was necessary to conduct a wider investigation into the artist’s time with the Ludovisi family. On relocating from Bologna to Rome, the painter encountered other artists already employed by the noble family, such as Domenichino, Giovanni Battista Viola, Giovanni Luigi Vales. At the same time, his proximity to Agostino Tassi brought him access to the finest architectural projects. These encounters informed the evolution of Guercino’s artistic style, evident in the refined quality of the work that adorns the walls and ceilings of the Villa.

The studies are revelatory, enriching existing scholarship on the Villa Ludovisi by the pre-eminent Sir Denis Mahon.

An exhibition entitled Something Happening Somewhere by Jack McGarrity, winner of the 2021-22 Sir Denis Mahon Award at the Royal Drawing School, is on display at Shoreditch Gallery, between 5-15^th September.

 Originally from the West of Scotland, McGarrity completed his BA at The Glasgow School of Art, before undertaking a Drawing Year at the Royal Drawing School. His work explores notions of the absurd, stillness, and alienation in the modern world. He combines painting and collage to create a witty duality, often disrupting the surface of the work with competing pictorial planes. The studio setting of Sea Wolf, for example, engenders a tension between the notable absence of a figure, and the indicators of their presence in the form of drawings strewn across the floor and walls, a jacket hung on an empty chair.

 In Jack McGarrity’s own words:

 ‘Over the last year The Sir Denis Mahon Award has allowed me the time and resources to develop my practice and to really digest what I had learned on The Drawing Year. The award has enabled me to experiment with scale materials and approaches to making work and has provided me with a year that has been incredibly beneficial to my practice. This exhibition represents the culmination of a year’s work in which I have continued my interrogation of quotidian scenarios as a means to explore space, atmosphere and surface.’

Jack McGarrity, Something Happening Somewhere, Shoreditch Gallery, 05-15 September

https://www.royaldrawingschool.org/lectures-events/jack-mcgarrity-sir-denis-mahon-award-2022-exhibition/

On February 19th, the Archaeological Gallery of the Royal Museums of Turin reopened its doors to the public after lengthy restoration work, making accessible once again one of Europe’s most important historical collections. Over 1,000 works have been selected for display, some for the very first time, to represent the magnificent 30,000-strong collection, begun by the House of Savoy and enriched by over four hundred years of subsequent discoveries by scholars and explorers.

Included are works exhibited by the Sir Denis Mahon Foundation last year: The Funerary Slab of Thallion and Thaubastis, an Etruscan Urn, and a Punic Stele depicting a woman with a flower. In the exhibition Time {?} and Eternal Life at Cromwell Place (October 5th – December 20th 2020), these pieces and other ancient artefacts were exhibited alongside works by modern greats Alberto Burri, John Latham, Emily Young, and other contemporary artists. This was a monumental curatorial event for the Foundation, drawing together works along a lineage from 2640 BCE to the present day through the concept of time and the immortality of the art. Accessible to the public once again through their renewed display in Turin, these works may continue to stand as a physical testament to time immemorial.

The Assemble*22 exhibition held at Tregony Gallery, Cornwall, will be coming to J/M Gallery in London between 8-20 February 2022. This exhibition will feature a diverse range of contemporary British artists, whose approaches share an engaging sensitivity. Amongst the artists exhibiting is Alex Cree, who in 2011 became the first recipient of the Sir Denis Mahon Awards for an outgoing student at the Royal Drawing School. Since then, he won the Phyllis Roberts award from the Royal Institute of Oil Painters in 2012, and has gone on to exhibit in Spain, Ireland, and throughout the UK. He is now based in Dorset where he has a studio.

Cree’s work, which spans portraiture, landscape, still life, and narrative scenes, is unified by his threefold personal artistic values: ‘A constant revision of colour and shape until a satisfying composition and colour balance is achieved; an excitement in rendering something of the third dimension on a flat canvas; and a concern that objects occupy a believable space in a believable world’. These values are evident in Mature Apples, which will feature in the exhibition; Cree pays close attention to the colourfully bruised surfaces of his cascading subjects in deference to Cezanne, embracing the strange perspective and tangible volume that occupied the modernist master’s work . Equally, Cree’s intense artistic scrutiny reveals the underlying presence of a rigorous analytic approach, redolent of Euan Uglow.

Assemble*22, 230 Portobello Road, 08-20 Feb 2022: Tregony Gallery – Assemble*22

To find out more about Alex Cree visit: www.alexcree.co.uk

The Sir Denis Mahon Foundation has commissioned a captivating video of the Prof. Marcello Pecchioli Library and Archive, narrated by Francesco Gonzales (Curator, Diocese of Novara, Heritage Office) and Federico Margelli (Physicist), both of whom were collaborators of Prof. Pecchioli. They have painstakingly inventoried the Library and Archive, on behalf of the Sir Denis Mahon Foundation, under the guidance and kind collaboration of  Avv. Luigi Pecchioli. The video was produced by Filippo Marcodini and the music composed by Tiziano Popoli.

Prof. Marcello Pecchioli (1954-2021) was a multi-disciplined and visionary academic, university lecturer and technological artist who left at his home in Bologna, Italy, an extraordinary library and archive of close to 8,000 books, over 300 of his own drawings and 120 works of art, including Alien Priest and the Sumerian Stele, 500 black and white negatives (including the enchanting  Suonatrice di Fisarmonica / Accordion Player) and around 3,000 DVDs and VHS films on such wide-ranging subjects as art, photography, philosophy, history and philosophy of science, theatre and television history, treatises on magic, UFOs and the history of religions and art criticism, reflecting his imposing intellect and numerous areas of expertise and interest in technological imagery, cinema, audiovisual communication, multimedia languages, computer graphics, video art, embracing alternative worlds and parallel universes alike.

The Sir Denis Mahon Foundation, which had the privilege of working with Prof. Pecchioli over the past three years, very much hopes that his Library and Archive will be an important resource for scholars and artists, and invites them to get in touch with us if they wish to consult any of the material.

PROF. MARCELLO PECCHIOLI LIBRARY AND ARCHIVE:
sirdenismahonfoundation.com/marcello-pecchioli-library-and-archive