A Better Landscape

EMaria Rebecca Ballestra and Alan Sonfist

22 November 2016 - 10 January 2017

UnimediaModern Contemporary Art

Squarciafico Palace - Piazza Invrea, 5 / b

16121 GENOA - ITALY

At the end of the seventies, when figurative painting was beginning to re-emerge from the limbo in which conceptualism and conceptualisms had relegated it, the Unimedia Gallery, which had moved in this area since its opening in 1970, had presented three emblematic exhibitions , “A historical cornerstone: the Conceptual”, “Creation was coming to an end”, “Love scratches on the skin of the planet”. Three major exhibitions for three major themes of those years: Conceptual Art, Anthropological Art and Land Art. The definition of Land Art, and with that of Earth Works, indicates those artistic operations which, starting from 1967/68, in particular in the United States of America, at the crossroads of New York and in the boundless places of the American West, are created by a group of artists, who call themselves nature fanatics, disappointed by the last phase of Modernism and eager to evaluate the power of art outside the aseptic environment of the exhibition spaces and urban areas characterized by the presence of institutions, intervening directly in natural territories, in uncontaminated spaces such as deserts, salt lakes, prairies, etc., placing the emphasis on
concept that man exploits and attacks nature to snatch from it what is necessary for its survival, but is nevertheless aware of its transcendent imperturbability, of its terrifying and uncontrollable power. Alan Sonfist, is one of the leading living exponents of the Land Art movement. His first major commissioned work was Time Landscape (Greenwich Village, 1965-1975), with the creation of a pre-colonial forest within a contemporary metropolis . Even today Alan Sonfist continues to promote an "ecological environmental art", in an attempt to raise public awareness on global climate change. Maria Rebecca Ballestra lives and works in nomadic conditions. His work focuses on the interpretation and reworking of social, political and environmental issues. His latest artistic production is oriented towards the perception of the future in relation to climate change, the multiple interventions of man in the natural environment and the sense of insecurity that characterizes this new millennium. Alan Sonfist and Maria Rebecca Ballestra met on the occasion of the "Contemporary Wine" exhibition in Certaldo in 2015. The human and professional encounter between the two was born from a common artistic commitment to environmental issues and a preference for site-specific projects. artists (and between two different generations), protagonists of this exhibition and the book that accompanies it.