CENSORED 2023

 

International Contemporary Art exhibition

2023 JUNE, 15th

Concept by Art Curator Matilde Della Pina

Since ancient times, the relationship between artistic creativity, freedom and censorship has always been a delicate and controversial issue for both artists and those who have dictated rules and laws to limit such creation. Art is by definition the highest manifestation of human freedom and instinct, of great impact and power, endowed with an incredible communicative speed made possible by the fact that it is primarily image and thus easily sticks in the mind of the viewer. The artworkknows how to move the soul, arouse strong emotions and excite, but it also often succeeds in shocking or arousing deep reflections that shake the heart and head. For these reasons, it has always been a cause of concern for those in power, fearful that the artist's creative instinctiveness went against the morals of the time or might subvert the social order. Censorship, therefore, has always been seen as the easiest and most effective way to limit such freedom, exercising authoritarian control to that end over artistic creation and more generally over the spread of ideas and points of view other than those that are "socially acceptable."

Throughout history, there have been quite a few events for which an artwork has been judged immoral or over the top. In 1564, for example, Pope Paul IV commissioned Daniele da Volterra to retouch the nudity in Michelangelo's Last Judgment, covering it up because it was deemed outrageous to public decorum. Another famous artist censored was Édouard Manet who in 1863 saw his Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe rejected by the jury of the Paris Salon for depicting a naked girl in the foreground, thus considering the painting unseemly and sarcastic toward the public. Even Egon Schiele himself, now known worldwide, was jailed in 1912 for contempt of court for his works of art that were deemed pornographic. And there is no shortage of examples in more recent times of provocative artworks that have provoked a large amount of criticism and controversy, such as that of the urinal entitled Fountain  (Urinoir) by the eccentric Marchel Duchamp that marked twentieth-century art, those of Damien Hirst consisting of stuffed animals in vitrines aimed at generating scandal and horror in the viewer, to the more recent but no less provocative artworks of the irreverent Maurizio Cattelan.

In a society increasingly under control and threatened by mechanisms more and more distant from being democratic, for "Censored" M.A.D.S. Art Gallery invites artists to give free rein to their creativity and instinct, following and indulging the creative flow without fear of anyone's judgment. M.A.D.S. pushes you artists to conceive art as something unconditional, as the absence of any inhibition in the creative act, except that which moves your consciousness as creators, without pre-set rules, without fears and prejudices. Never letting respect for human, ethical and moral values and the sensibilities of others, the founding principle of the gallery, give life to what you feel inside, to what identifies you and makes you unique, which does not have to be right, nor clear, norstereotypical, but must be yours, because only then will it be authentic! And only with M.A.D.S., it will be uncensored.