From 9th June to 25th July 2010 GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo presents the exhibition entitled 18 modi di progettare ad Arte (“Ad Artem”- 18 ways of making Art), dedicated to the versatile and multidisciplinary figure of Corrado Levi.

Artist, architect, writer and critic, Corrado Levi defied and keeps on defying the restrictive boundaries of the single disciplines, disclosing from time to time new expressive possibilities for contemporary culture.

In his own words:
“I am an Italian with a multilayered education: as an architect I was an apprentice of Franco Albini and Carlo Mollino, as a writer I was a disciple of Karl Kraus and Erik Satie, as an artist I learned from many different generations of artists – from Arte Povera I assimilate the language, from Transavanguardia I take in the freedom, of the graffiti artists I wish I had the street to work in, and so on”.

Like Alberto Savinio, Fortunato Depero and Bruno Munari – masters that were too free to be framed into limited professional areas, disciplines or historiographical conventions – Corrado Levi is the versatile character investigated in this exhibition, the first to be dedicated to him by a museum. The show presents Levi’s work of the last fifty years, works standing in between architecture and art. His productions have been “cut”, “deconstructed” and then reassembled forming new categories, connected to his recurrent methods of action.

The exhibition, curated by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio and Beppe Finessi is not a simple collection of works displayed in chronological order, but intends to be an investigation into the artist’s thought, carried out through the 18 different ways of making art mentioned in the title.

Works that show new possibilities of formulating art and projects in a broad sense, allowing influences by other suggestions; projects that are dense with functional attentions and structural concerns; projects made “ad artem” and “art as a project”; works that look with attention to body language between eroticism and humour, works like productive inventions meant to be realized.
Works that even begin from mistakes, that include traces and diversions and offer new interpretations or lead away from immediate comprehension; works that find solutions through a series of variations, experimenting all the possibilities at the reach of a pencil, paintbrush, sculpture, installation, model or action.
Works that look around, respecting the context, the pre-existences, nature; works that allude, suggest, recall somewhere in between a smile and the world of dream; projects in which sometimes the primary choice is that of not choosing, but to let chance win, after having understood it.

A sort of new creative dictionary to learn to make art in many different ways.