Michela Rizzo and Simone Frittelli are pleased to announce the opening of their new gallery in Milan at Viale Stelvio 66, which will join their respective spaces in Venice and Florence. With the first exhibition, Disegno singolare. Il disegno ai tempi dell’Intelligenza Artificiale, curated by Elio Grazioli, the gallerists aim to immediately suggest some of the characteristics they intend to uphold in their programme. The gallery aims, in fact, to offer a space where collectors, scholars and visitors feel at ease in an atmosphere of reflection on the issues of art, while remaining committed to the protection and promotion of their own artists.

Why drawing? Firstly, giving a definition of “drawing” today is quite problematic, as all categories of contemporary art have become open and varied. Here it is understood as work on paper using quick tools, primarily pencils, adopted to allow greater freedom, less premeditation, less planning, and to make room for impulse, idea, audacity, chance, automatisms, the unconscious, in ways not as freely possible in works made with other techniques. Precisely for this reason, drawing becomes the site of a layering of demands, of which the complex yet fascinating dialectic is of interest here, gaining full characterisation and autonomy as a work in its own right.

Grazioli starts from the observation that it seems that at every moment in contemporary times when strong social, technological, or cultural changes occur, or when artists aim to assert their originality in relation to the movements around them, they return to focus on drawing. And not only artists, but also historians, critics, and theorists. A glance at the last few decades shows major exhibitions and important publications that support this observation. Grazioli naturally addresses this in the text he wrote for the occasion. The current moment of change to which we naturally refer today is that marked by the Internet, social media, and even more recently, Artificial Intelligence. This serves as a backdrop, not directly: the exhibition will include few examples of direct engagement with AI, but, once again, it is no coincidence that drawing re-emerges when one can draw differently, when technology forces us to rethink our human, creative, and aesthetic condition.

The title of the exhibition, Disegno singolare. Il disegno ai tempi dell’Intelligenza Artificiale, signals singularity as the major theme of engagement beyond technical issues: human beings, especially artists, embody, defend, and enact the singularity of human characteristics, whereas technology follows programmes, has no reason to distinguish itself, to transgress, to think outside the box, or to be original.

The exhibition is not museum-like but illustrative; it draws, as mentioned, on the availability and interests of the gallerists and the critic. It will be divided into two sections: a “historical” one, featuring examples of artists who have used drawing to explore and reveal their divergence from established categories and movements. These include Dadamaino, Mario Schifano, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Chiari, Alighiero Boetti, Eva Sorensen, Ketty La Rocca, Carol Rama, Lucio Pozzi, Pietro Fortuna, a selection that nevertheless offers the opportunity for reflection on the last few decades.

The second section focuses on more recent artists: the aim is to present various new uses and conceptions of drawing that explore the reasons for singularity. The artists are Stefano Arienti, Luca Pancrazzi, Eva Marisaldi and Enrico Serotti, Claudia Losi, Marco Cingolani, Gianluca Codeghini, Andrea Mastrovito, Giulio Lacchini, Sergio Breviario, Maria Teresa Sartori, Matthew Attard, and Giorgia Fincato. These artists allow the exhibition’s subject to be considered from different perspectives, through various angles, touching on many other themes: animal intelligence alongside human and artificial intelligence, the need for strategies to avoid presumed spontaneity, and the roles of sensitivity, the unconscious, and technique.

During the exhibition, a catalogue will be published with an extensive text by Elio Grazioli, who in turn seeks to map out the relationships and stratifications of these subjects.