Vincenzo Agnetti: Tempo e Memoria

Cardi Gallery is proud to present 'Vincenzo Agnetti | Tempo e Memoria', an exhibition dedicated to Italian conceptual artist, poet and essayist Vincenzo Agnetti (1926-1981) in collaboration with the Archivio Vincenzo Agnetti. Taking place simultaneously across Cardi’s two galleries in London and Milan, “Vincenzo Agnetti | Tempo e Memoria” explores the artist’s unique and timely reflections on language, art and memory through a comprehensive selection of mixed-media works charting his radical and playful uses of images and text. Installed over three floors of the Mayfair gallery, the London show features circa twenty works created between 1969 and 1975, including the celebrated Felts and Axioms alongside rarely seen installations. During the London Gallery Weekend, the exhibition will be complemented by a special performance of Agnetti’s “Elisabetta d’Inghilterra”, an experimental piece of “Static Theatre” first staged during the 1976 Venice Biennale. One of the central figures in the Conceptual Art movement of the early 1960s, Agnetti first gained renown as a writer and theorist in the Milanese avant-garde alongside Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni, whose journal Azimuth voiced the ideals and aspirations of a new generation of Italian artists. Having trained as an actor and playwright at Milan’s Teatro Piccolo prior to becoming an artist, Agnetti retained a performative approach to artmaking, insisting on the participatory role of the audience in giving life to a work of art. Across a short yet remarkably prolific and influential career – from 1967 until his death in 1981 – the artist engaged with the cultural and philosophical debates of his time, channelling post-war preoccupations with media, history and politics into a deeply personal and poetic artistic vision. Although keenly aware of the unstable nature of words and systems of knowledge, Agnetti nonetheless relied on the expressive potential of language, its ability to shape history and renew consciousness.

A multidisciplinary artist, writer, and poet, Vincenzo Agnetti was a leading figure of Italian conceptual art in the 1960s and 70s. Born in Milan in 1926, Agnetti graduated from the Brera Academy and later studied dramaturgy at the Piccolo Teatro school. In the following years, he made paintings inspired by Art Informel and was active as a poet and critic in the Milanese avant-garde scene. In t...

A multidisciplinary artist, writer, and poet, Vincenzo Agnetti was a leading figure of Italian conceptual art in the 1960s and 70s. Born in Milan in 1926, Agnetti graduated from the Brera Academy and later studied dramaturgy at the Piccolo Teatro school. In the following years, he made paintings inspired by Art Informel and was active as a poet and critic in the Milanese avant-garde scene. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Agnetti befriended fellow artists Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni, with whom he collaborated on the influential journal Azimuth and shared philosophical and artistic ideals.

In 1962 the artist left Milan and moved to Argentina, where he worked in the field of technological automation. This self-defined period of “no-art” was marked by a “refusal to paint” and “the gaining of awareness through low, dull work, for true freedom; it was about heading towards new horizons.” From 1967 to 1981, the year of his untimely death, Agnetti returned to Italy and embarked on a tireless production of works centered around poetry and the written word. In 1967 the artist self-published the first of several experimental novels, Obsoleto, and held his inaugural solo exhibition at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara. In 1970 he created his famed Macchina Drogata, a mechanical Olivetti calculator whose numbers were replaced with letters, leading to a series of nonsensical words and combinations dictated by chance.

Throughout the 1970s Agnetti exhibited his renowned Felts and Axioms, works which explored the poetic and philosophical uses of language in both Italian and English. In 1973 he opened a studio in New York, where he worked intermittently, and continued to hold numerous exhibitions in Italy and internationally in the following period. For Agnetti, language was both a critical measure for understanding the world and a vast repository of cultural memory and history. In this respect, his works function as elements of a broader intellectual pursuit, generating a conceptual mechanism that remains with the viewer beyond the initial encounter.

Vincenzo Agnetti died in Milan in 1981, at the age of 55.