Agostino Iacurci’s (Foggia, 1986) practice embraces painting, sculpture and drawing: various media that the artist integrates and articulates in layered installations and immersive environments where diverse elements and fragments of reality all come into play. In his polychrome works with synthetic forms, through an essential language, he guides multiple levels of interpretation. This approach places his stories on the perennial threshold between innocence and artifice, serenity and catastrophe.
On this occasion, Iacurci’s increasing focus on environments and the management of space in relation to exhibition staging encounters the volumes of the Polveriera Superiore, the late-sixteenth-century war architecture with a rigorous form to it, now part of the “Lorenzo Rota” Botanical Garden in Bergamo.
The installation conceived by Iacurci, and staged in collaboration with the Botanical Garden, constitutes a site-specific adaptation of the Dry Days, Tropical Nights project presented in 2023 at the historic Largo Treves tower in Milan. Made up of several luminous sculptural elements, the work—produced by glo™ for art—offers a reflection on landscape and its constant transformation over time.
Iacurci draws inspiration from the book Viaggio nell’Italia dell’Antropocene, by philosopher and evolutionist Telmo Pievani and geographer Mauro Varotto. The book reinterprets the eighteenth-century Grand Tour, a thousand years after Goethe’s Italian Journey.
Pievani and Varotto offer a narrative that throws us into an Italy radically transformed by global warming and the environmental crisis. Iconic places and traditional landscapes are described as environmental dystopias, where extreme phenomena such as desertification, rising sea levels, and tropical weather conditions have radically altered the face of the nation.
The artist shapes this vision by transforming the space into a kind of oasis that is “at once a shimmering mirage and a portent of the near future.”
Iacurci’s installation Dry Days, Tropical Nights references two key environmental indicators, which describe the severity of heat during a given period in a given area, suggesting that, if current climate trends continue, the Po Valley and Italy could turn into a tropical landscape with extensive desert areas within a few hundred years.
Completing the installation is a sound intervention designed especially for the work by Lechuga Zafiro, a Uruguayan DJ and producer whose musical experimentation blends the exploratory essence of club culture with the poetics of sound design, expressing the nuances of Latin American music culture.
The soundscape that fills the space is based on field recordings in various protected areas between Mexico and Uruguay, and is part of his larger project Biopaisajes Sonoros.
At the end of the exhibition period, the installation will become part of GAMeC’s holdings thanks to its donation by the artist.
Biographical Notes
Agostino Iacurci lives in Bologna. He studied visual arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. His artistic practice encompasses various media including painting, sculpture, drawing and installation. Often guided by a collaborative and site-specific approach, Iacurci collects and reworks heterogeneous materials to generate images and visions that freely narrate and interweave cultural history, personal memories, literary references, and vernacular tales.
Iacurci has exhibited his works in solo and group exhibitions, including Ruinenlust at Garage Bentivoglio, Bologna (2024); The Traveling Landscape, PDC Gallery, Los Angeles (2023); Alien Horti Picti, Robert Grunenberg, Berlin (2023); Of My Abstract Gardening, Ex Elettrofonica, Rome (2022); Hortus, IIC, Prague (2022); Tracing Vitruvio, Musei Civici, Pesaro (2019); Talent Prize 2019, Mattatoio, Rome (2019); Gypsoteca, M77 Gallery, Milan (2018); Trompe-l’oeil, Celaya Brothers Gallery, Mexico City (2017); Urban Art Biennale, Völklinger Hütte, European Center for Industrial Art and Culture (2017); Cross the Streets, MACRO Museo, Rome (2017); and the 16th Cairo Prize, Palazzo della Permanente, Milan (2015). Since 2009, Iacurci has created monumental wall paintings and installations for both public and private institutions. Recent commissions include Ensemble at Casa Italia, Le Pré Catelan, Paris (2024); the Côte-des-Neiges Mural Project, Montreal (2022); MURALU for the Ludwigs-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen (2021); Life is Beautiful, Las Vegas (2021); Principal Place, London (2020); Yakutsk Biennial, Yakutsk (2017); Distrito Tec University, Monterrey (2016); Govind Puri Metro Station, New Delhi (2016); Mario Penna Institute, Belo Horizonte, Brazil (2014); University Campus, Besançon (2014), Rebibbia Prison, Rome (2012), and Fubon Art Foundation, Taipei (2012). He has participated in several residency programs, including Artivist in Seoul (2023), the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York (2020–2022), and Plop x Cob Residency in London (2021). He was an Associate Research Scholar at Columbia University in 2020. Iacurci has received numerous awards, including the Premio Ermanno Casoli (2024), the New York Prize sponsored by MiBAC, MFA and the Italian Academy-Columbia University (2020–2022), and the Cantica21 Italian Contemporary Art Everywhere Prize (2021).
