The work of Italian artist Mattia Bosco will be showcased at the Temple of Venus and Rome, located between the Colosseum and the Roman Forum, with an installation featuring 12 marble sculptures. Created specifically for the event, these pieces evoke the spirit of the ancient marbles that once occupied this space. The material, which is at the core of the artist’s approach, becomes the protagonist of a history which unites the past, present, and future.
The Temple of Venus and Rome, an immense sacred building inaugurated in 136 AD, contained precious pieces of marble, many of which have now been removed. The diversity of these ancient marbles, imported by the Romans from the most distant regions of their vast empire, bore witness to the enormous and far-reaching mosaic of power of Eternal Rome.
With his Korai exhibition, Mattia Bosco reintroduces these precious materials to the vestiges of the ancient temple, in a new form. In profound harmony with the spirit of the site, these 12 marble sculptures create the impression of a distant world that has reemerged, of something that was taken away but has now resurfaced, like ancient inhabitants who return with a new aspect, unrecognizable, transformed, but revealing, by the way they inhabit the space, that they are at home here.
The active protagonist of the project is the temple itself, divided into two adjacent spaces: the chamber dedicated to the goddess of Rome, the incarnation of the Eternal City, and the chamber of Venus, the goddess of beauty and the ancestress of the Julian lineage.
In the first chamber, nine human-sized sculptures will be arranged in a circle, all of them with the same form, but each one cut from a different marble: Cipollino, Portoro, Baradiglio, the Carrara marble, etc. These materials which once graced columns, inlaid floors, and walls, now return as sculptures, creating a material and temporal continuity that unites the past, present, and future.
Both similar and distinct at the same time, these nine pieces give their name to the “Korai” (plural of Kore) exhibition “because they have the same hieratic presence as the sculptures of virgins from the Greek Archaic period”. Vestals of the temple, these works by Mattia Bosco celebrate the oldest cult in the world, that of the material from which they are made, and the very one that constitutes us.
This exhibition was launched as part of the “Level 0” project, an initiative of ArtVerona that invites museums and private foundations to select one or more artists from those present at the fair and commit to promoting them within their future programming through an exhibition, an installation, a talk, a publication, or a workshop.
For the 16th edition of the fair, in 2021, twenty Italian art institutions were chosen, including the Colosseum Archeological Park (ParCo) in Rome.
Daniele Fortuna, the manager of exhibitions and events at ParCo, selected Mattia Bosco because of the resonance between his work and mission of the archeological park, specifically: the artist’s search for the sculptural potential of the materials, and his creative process which is driven by a desire to allow the natural form of the material to emerge spontaneously, in harmony with the site and the situation.
Mattia Bosco is represented by the Artistics gallery which provided financial support for the exhibition.
Exhibition from September 22, 2023, to March 3, 2024
Parco archeologico del Colosseo
Piazza Santa Maria Nova, 53
00186 Roma
