Ca’ di Fra
arte contemporanea

presents  the exhibition

IL SEGNO DI UGO LA PIETRA
Ceramiche ingobbiate e incise 

from Thursday 19 January to Friday 24 February 2023

the Artist will be present in the gallery on Thursday 19 January at 6.30 pm

Via Carlo Farini 2
20154 Milano

The exhibition brings together a series of ceramics engobed and engraved by the author who has maintained the sign component within his research since the 1960s: the “sign” as an element of rupture or risk, represents for La Pietra the tool capable of intervene in the meshes of pre-established situations, and tell personal and non-aligned paths.

This exhibition presents for the first time an extensive review of ceramics by Ugo La Pietra that do not belong to that large production, which the author has created with artisans from all over Italy, known as his interpretation of the territorial “genius loci”; the exhibition brings together a collection of “Libri aperti” and a series of slipped and engraved tiles (from the “Erbario” collection), a series of engraved plates (the installation inspired by “L’ultima cena”) and large three-dimensional trays and engraved (“Casa e giardino” and “Itinerari” collections) which represent the three-dimensional application, through the expressive medium of ceramics, of his research on signs.

These objects/works of art are linked, in an ideal homage and passing of the baton, to the ceramic works that Lucio Fontana (of which La Pietra was a young painter pupil) created in the 1950s, engraving masses of terracotta with his “cuts” which revealed, under the glaze, the essence of the earth.

The sign of La Pietra, unlike that of Fontana, is much more narrative, also taking up the references to the various artistic currents he crossed (pittura segnica and narrative art) to the point of revealing the themes he investigated in his research on the urban environment : preferential itineraries, from the center to the suburbs, urban gardens, the garden of delights.