What becomes of contact in a world of images? With the advent of mass culture in the 1960s, the image became the basic unit of consumption. Television sets, billboards and flimsy magazine spreads extended promises of opulence that remained, by design, out of reach. Imagine: New Imagery in Italian Art 1960-1969, a thoughtful show at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, attempts to reconcile the opposing imperatives of an era at once remote and intimate.
Many of the works on display recall the glib sensuality of advertisements—paradoxically one-dimensional appeals to the voluptuous three-dimensionality of their products. The exhibition vacillates between estrangement and encounter, image and object. At its best, it positions images as a way of reconstituting a viscerally material world, resuscitating the lost art of touch.
Source: http://theartnewspaper.com/
