Seoul ‘88, 1988

Iron, wood and paint, 53×72,2×16 cm
Mauro Staccioli Archive Museum, Volterra

In 1987 Mauro Staccioli was invited to Seoul, together with other artists, by Pierre Restany, a member of the commission for the sculpture symposium organized on the occasion of the 1988 Olympics. After an initial hypothesis of intervention was rejected, a triangle placed on the bank of a small lake, Staccioli opted for an inverted arch to be realized in a totally different place from the first one, a vast square in the center of the newly-born Olympic Park, surrounded by buildings that had just been built in for the Olympic competitions. If already at its first appearance in the formal dialogue with the internal colonnade of the Rotonda della Besana, the inverted arch showed an expressive power in all its formal and geometric simplicity, it now proves to capture the intensity of the Olympic echo and expresses all its communicative force. In fact, the welcoming, huge, and upward-thrusting curve derives from suggestions that the Korean Olympic symbol solicits from it.

© Enrico Fontolan, Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Insitute, Roma. Courtesy Archivio Mauro Staccioli.
L’Archivio Mauro Staccioli ha collaborato con la Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute di Roma per la digitalizzazione dell’intero corpus documentario afferente ai lavori realizzati o ipotizzati dall’artista, dall’inizio della carriera fino al 1988. Si ringrazia il fotografo Enrico Fontolan, il Digital Humanities Lab e il Fondo Fotografico della Bibliotheca Hertziana per l’enorme lavoro svolto. Tutto il materiale è consultabile online cliccando qui.