Pietro Consagra. Sette Sculture.

The Alessandro Albanese Gallery, in collaboration with the Pietro Consagra Archive and the Oltre l'Arte cooperative, is inaugurating the exhibition "Pietro Consagra. Seven Sculptures," curated by Giorgio Verzotti and sponsored by the Municipality of Matera, the Zetema Foundation, and the Musma Museum. The inauguration will take place on Wednesday, July 22, 2026, from 5:00 PM to 9:00 PM, at the Church of Purgatory in Matera. The Church of Purgatory in Matera, now known throughout the city as an exhibition space dedicated to contemporary art as well as a sacred building, is hosting an exhibition by Pietro Consagra this summer. Recognized, both in Italy and abroad, as a leading figure in contemporary sculpture, Consagra had already left important traces in the city: a large, widely discussed open-air exhibition of sculptures in 1978, and several works preserved in the City Museum. This time, his presence is more restrained, with only seven sculptures, yet they retain all the salient features of the artist's singular language: the choice of two-dimensionality in the sculptural work, the renunciation of three-dimensionality, the all-round nature of traditional sculpture. Indeed, since his debut, Consagra has renewed and even revolutionized the language of traditional sculpture, first by choosing abstraction and then by reducing the volumetric development of the sculpted work to frontality. The exhibition, compact and essential, brings together bronzes, irons, and painted woods spanning decades of the Sicilian artist's research: works such as Bifrontale (1984), Ferro vuoto (Empty Iron), Legno dipinto (Painted Wood) (1984), and the series Prominenze (Prominences) (1995) dialogue with the baroque spaces of the church, in a direct confrontation between the contemporary and the sacred. Nearly fifty years after the historic open-air exhibition of 1978, Consagra's sculptures thus return to Matera in a renewed dialogue with the city. Text by Giorgio Verzotti

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