CENACOLO DI OGNISSANTI
Borgo Ognissanti, 42
Closed on Wednesday
10.00am – 18.00am
Free admission
From February 23rd until June 22nd, arrives directly to Florence from its widely acclaimed official participation in the 2007 Venice Biennale, the art exhibition Transcendental Realism: The Art of Adi Da Samraj. Thanks to the exceptional helpfulness of the Soprintendenza Speciale per il Polo Museale Fiorentino, the event will be hosted in the Cenacolo di Ognissanti that in this occasion opens for the first time to modern art.
Curated by Achille Bonito Oliva the exhibition is organized by the Comitato Promotore Inverno a Firenze.
The centerpiece of the event at the Cenacolo d’Ognissanti is Alberti’s Window I (14m) is a reference to Leon Baptiste Alberti, the Florentine architect and philosopher whose ideas on perspective issues are figured extensively in Adi Da Samraj’s work.
The masterpiece being probably the most ambitious artwork of the eclectic American artist, traces the passage of two different measures of time simultaneously, the cycle of a day and the cycle of a week. And as such, for all its elaborate geometry, it actually represents the observation of the real world.
It is also a fascinating idea the one to exhibit Adi Da’s works in a location such as the Cenacolo d’Ognissanti, directly at eye contact with Domenico Ghiralndaio’
Adi da quotes: The art I make and do has a profound purpose. Therefore, the art I make and do can only be fully rightly viewed within a context that supports that purpose…A traditional temple or church is culturally and artistically purposed to open up into something beyond. A life-transforming space that is profoundly protective, and, yet demanding.
Adi Da’s artistic sensibility can be identified as Modernist or perhaps Neo-Modernist and as such he lingers and focuses his work on a highly formal vocabulary, paring his shapes down to circles, or fractions thereof, squares and triangles. It is out of this three-form vocabulary that Adi Da has formulated his vast Geome series, however maintaining a strong connotation of his own identity.
