Frieze Masters

Hauser & Wirth’s historical presentation at Frieze Masters 2019, ‘Before or After, at the Same Time: Rome, Milan, and Fabio Mauri’, is an exploration of post-war Italian art through the cultural orbit of remarkable 20th-century thinkers and artists. The project takes the fascinating narrative of Fabio Mauri, an artist, writer, producer and intellectual, alongside the history of his family – a publishing dynasty which thrived on close connections to radical Italian art, poetry, cinema, philosophy and literature – as a starting point to explore Italian visual culture, its influences and the defining ideas behind it. The title refers to Mauri’s statement: ‘I can’t stay in step with my time. I am either before or after it, at the same time.’ (Fabio Mauri, Ideology and Memory).

The social and political aftermath of the Second World War engendered two highly energetic pockets of creativity in the cities of Rome and Milan. The exhibit is a tale of these two cities, with Mauri – a multi-disciplinary artist who resisted categorisation – acting as the point of introduction to the artistic practices that emerged from each of these distinct cultural, economic and political scenes. The project examines and, in cases, re-examines the artistic milieu surrounding Mauri which included Carla Accardi, Franco Angeli, Enrico Baj, Alberto Burri, Alighiero Boetti, Enrico Castellani, Dadamaino, Piero Dorazio, Tano Festa, Lucio Fontana, Jannis Kounellis, Piero Manzoni, Gastone Novelli, Mimmo Rotella, Mario Schifano, Giulio Turcato and Cy Twombly.

Moretti Fine Art collaborates for the fifth consecutive year with Hauser & Wirth, and a series of exceptional Old Master works create dialogues in Italian art across the centuries, reflecting Fabio Mauri’s own interests. The booth has been designed by the renowned architectural practice baukuh, based in Milan and Genoa, and is configured as a series of six ‘rooms’.