CHIARA DYNYS. MELANCHOLIA

Museo MA*GA is pleased to present Chiara Dynys exhibition Melancholia.
As stated by the curator Alessandro Castiglioni “The aim of this exhibition is to explore Chiara Dynys’s film imagery. Although Dynys has worked in multiple art forms, including the moving image, she has never completely revealed until now the importance that cinema and certain male and female directors in particular have held in the constant redefinition of her artistic style. Exploring her Filmic Imaginary means identifying the generative capacity that cinema in general has had for the artist.l
The comments of a number of major directors in the history of cinema, from Roberto Rossellini to Jane Campion and Lars von Trier, from Federico Fellini to Paolo Sorrentino, reverberate through Dynys’s chosen forms of expression: light and space transfigure narratives and moving images as they reoccur in the artist’s work from the 1980s until today.
The exhibition is therefore a map for immersing oneself in the work of Chiara Dynys, for discovering and redefining it in the light of interpretive devices that are neither chronological nor thematic but, like the works them- selves, take the form of places of encounter: walking through labyrinths, being surprised by lights, ghosts and mirrors, testing one’s ability to see and understand, being overwhelmed by the transient desires of the unconscious, and crossing the thresholds of perception”.

Chiara Dynys is one of the most important Italian contemporary artists. Her work is studied and presented by many Italian and international institutions.
Among the Italian museums that have hosted her work are the MART, Rovereto (2005–11); Museo del Novecento, Milan (2012); Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome (2013); Museo Correr, Venice (2019); Villa e Collezione Panza, Varese (2009–21); and MA*GA, Gallarate (2022). 
Dynys’s participation in exhibitions dedicated to twentieth- and twenty-first-century art has positioned her work as a reference for studies focused on the relationship between space and light, installation, and conceptual visual languages. Such exhibitions include Aspectos da Pintura Italiana: do Após– Guerra aos Nossos Dias, Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro and Museu de Arte, São Paulo (1989); WHERE? L’identité ailleurs que dans l’identification, Musée d’art moderne de Saint-Étienne (1992); The Shape of the World, PAC Contemporary Art Pavilion, Milan (2000); Light Art from Artificial Light, ZKM | Museum für Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe (2006); La parola nell’arte, MART, Rovereto (2007); 7th International Moscow Biennale, Arkhangelskoye Palace, Moscow (2017); and Soundlines of Contemporary Art, ICAE Armenia, Yerevan (2018). 
Among the international institutions that have hosted Chiara Dynys’s work are the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva (1996); Centre international d’art contemporain, Montréal (1997); Städtische Galerie, Stuttgart (1999); Museo cantonale, Lugano (2001–15); the Rome Quadriennale (1986–2005); Kunstmuseum Museum, Bochum (2003); Kunstmu- seum, Bonn (2004); Wolfsberg Executive Development Centre, Wolfsberg (2005); Spazio-1, Giancarlo and Danna Olgiati Collection, LAC, Lugano (2012); MASI– Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana, Lugano (2018); and Palazzo Maffei Casa Museo, Verona (2021).