In Focus: Fausto Melotti

Join us for a conversation in celebration of ‘Fausto Melotti. Theatre’, featuring the exhibition’s curator, Saim Demircan, alongside artists Aaron Angell and Allison Katz.

The themes of the exhibition will provide a framework with which to consider how and where theatricality meets artistic practice and exhibition-making. Angell – who also designed ‘Fausto Melotti. Theatre’ – and Katz will then discuss their own practices and in what ways staging factors into their work.

‘Fausto Melotti. Theatre’ is open until 20 April 2022.

The exhibitions displays a selection of sculptures, ceramic pieces and works on paper by Italian sculptor, painter and poet Fausto Melotti for the first time at Hauser & Wirth in London. Curated by writer and curator Saim Demircan, the exhibition places an emphasis on the theatrical within Melotti’s practice and includes works spanning four decades from the 1930s until his passing in 1986.

Installation view, ‘Fausto Melotti. Theatre’, Hauser & Wirth London, 2022 © Fondazione Fausto Melotti, Milano. Courtesy Fondazione Fausto Melotti, Milan. Photo: Alex Delfanne.

About Saim Demircan Saim Demircan is a curator and writer based in New York and Turin. Recently, he has curated exhibitions at 80WSE, NYC; Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, and Fridericianum, Kassel. He was the 2017 recipient of the Goethe-Institut New York’s curatorial residency program, Ludlow 38 in NYC. Between 2012 and 2015 he was a curator at Kunstverein München in Munich. Previously, he curated a two-year program of offsite projects, as well as an exhibition of works by German artist Kai Althoff at Focal Point Gallery in Southend-on-Sea. Demircan has published on numerous artistic practices; his writing regularly appears in periodicals such as Art Monthly, frieze and Texte Zur Kunst.

About Aaron Angell Aaron Angell is an artist living and working in London. Primarily working with ceramic material, his practice is concerned with the history of Eastern and Western pottery, non-canonical or folk histories, marginal forms of image making and the intersection of poetic thought and sculpture. He fires with gas and wood and is interested primarily in atmospheric glazing methods more commonly linked with the Shigaraki Valley region of Japan. As well as comprising Angell’s personal studio, his workshop Troy Town has hosted over 90 artists in residence since 2014. It is also home to Hoxton Gardenware, a youth project training local young people to produce artisanal terracotta gardenware. Angell’s work is in the permanent collection of Tate, V&A Museum, The Arts Council Collection, and others.

About Allison Katz Allison Katz is an artist living and working in London. Her solo exhibition ‘Artery’ is currently on view at Camden Art Centre, London, until 25 March 2022. She has been invited to participate in the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, ‘The Milk of Dreams’, curated by Cecilia Alemani. Katz has held solo exhibitions at Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK; MIT List Center for the Arts, Cambridge, MA; Oakville Galleries, Oakville, Canada; and Kunstverein Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany. Notable recent group exhibitions include ‘Mixing It Up: Painting Today’, Hayward Gallery, London, UK; ‘The Imaginary Sea’, Fondation Carmignac, Porquerolles, France; and ‘Maskulinitäten’, Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany. A comprehensive monograph on Katz’s work was published by JRP|Editions in 2020.