Dates: Through June 25

Hours: 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Closed Monday

Add: He Xiangning Art Gallery, Overseas Chinese Town, Shennan Thoroughfare, Nanshan District

（南山区华侨城何香凝美术馆）

Buses: 21, 26, 32, 54, 59, 101, 105, 109, 121, 204, 209, 223, 234, 327, 328, 350, 370, 390.

Metro: Hua Qiao Cheng Station (Overseas Chinese Town Station, 华侨城站), Exit C

Newman Huo

A CONTEMPORARY Italian sculpture exhibition to run in He Xiangning Art Museum through June 25 aims to bring a new concept of sculpture to Chinese audiences.

Titled “Subtle Energies of Matter — Italian Contemporary Sculpture International Review,” the exhibition features a total of 50 works by 31 Italian artists, including some master artists from the Italian art movement “Arte Povera” (“Poor Art”) and some recently emerging young artists.

The exhibition focuses on a vivid and dramatic art space with the connection of matter and transience through its exploration in the relationship between sculpture, architectural design, music, philosophy and photography as well as between light, shade and space.

Because of the use of various portable materials in their design and the effect of light, color and video, the seemingly heavy materials used by artists have lost their inherent weight in their works. They are suspended to give audiences the feel of entering a three dimensional space with visual dynamics brought about by the “subtle energies of matter.”

The exhibition, which opened in the art museum yesterday, came to Shenzhen after exhibitions in Beijing and Shanghai.

“The reason why we chose Shenzhen as the last leg of our tour on the Chinese mainland is because Shenzhen is one of the most important art cities in China along with Beijing and Shanghai,” the exhibition’s Italian executive curator, Alessandro Carrer, said yesterday.

“Shenzhen is a new and dynamic city in South China with a lot of young people whose average age is said to be less than 30 years old. We believe young people in Shenzhen will more easily accept the exhibition,” said Carrer.

Italy is especially famous for its classic sculptures, such as works by Michelangelo from the Renaissance Period.

“However, people outside Italy know comparatively little of the contemporary Italian sculpture over the past century because not many Italian artists have had opportunities to hold exhibitions outside their country,” Carrer said.

“In the exhibition, we have purposefully made comparisons between works by master artists from the Italian art movement ‘Arte Povera’ and those by young artists who have emerged in recent years to show the basic thread of development of contemporary Italian sculpture over the 20th century,” he said.

Starting in the 1960s, “Arte Povera” was one of the most important art movements in Italy dealing with urban life as well as new developments.

In 1967, Italian critic and curator Germano Celant defined “Arte Povera” as the work of a group of young Italian artists based at Italy’s Castello di Rivoli Contemporary Art Museum, situated in Rivoli, Turin.

The young artists were recognized for their varied and free experimental work; their drastic and at the time innovative use of everyday or organic materials such as stone, sponge, wool, wood, cloth, steel, wax, felt or cement; and their fusion of nature and culture in a reflection of current life.

Through sculpture and installations, they explored the relationship between art and life as it is made manifest through nature, elemental matter or cultural artifacts, and experienced through the body.

“Generally, ‘Arte Povera’ is defined as an art of simple materials because the artists of this movement believe that energy lies inside these materials and they can express their personal poetics merely with those simple materials,” Carrer said.

According to Carrer, master artists from the “Arte Povera” participating in the exhibition include Giulio Paolini, Piero Fogliati, and Marco Gastini.

With his work dating from 1966, Giulio Paolini offers visitors one of the most convincing examples of his theoretical reflections on the nature of the artwork and its occupation of space as well as on light and color.

This work is built around an articulated joint, which serves as a hub for a number of thin metal rods that outline the coordinates of an angular space.

In the daytime, these rods are perceived as white-on-white signs, but at night they appear as fluorescent, luminous signs.

Through these spatial vectors, the artist wants to construct a device that at once encloses the uncertainty of perception and highlights the certainty of an aesthetic language based on analytical thought and on the question that all of us, when standing in front on the work, ask ourselves about the decisive principles of ‘seeing’.

Among the emerging artists taking part in the exhibition, Filippo Centenari, 29, is the youngest.

Centenari belongs to a Utopian territory, where technology is not divisive but shared, and a single note becomes a chord.

His works highlight the presence of diverse languages and forms of expression, a coagulation of media that is not Babel but is an organic, complex structure: the senses are mixed, the functions of the individual elements gradually lose their force, becoming something else, and the work opens out to encompass aesthetic apprehension.

The day-to-day objects that make up Centinari’s works seem to be open to new meanings, somewhere between oxymoron and visual synesthesia, deautomating the standard interpretative keys to generate a disturbing landscape.

In the work of this artist based in the northern Italian city of Cremona, the German word, “unheimlich,” which means “the uncanny” in English, does not necessarily generate fear.

Instead, it leads audiences to understand that strangeness is often part-and-parcel of everyday life, but art is still fortunately able to produce new, unrecognized harmonies.