“Crucifixions”, The Francis Bacon Collection

"Crocifissioni + Crucifixions" was an exhibition at Palazzo Aldrovandi Montanari, an eighteenth-century palace on Via Galliera in Bologna that once housed the city's central public library. It set up a dialogue between Francis Bacon, Concetto Pozzati and Hermann Nitsch around violence, pain, religion and the image of the crucified body. The Bacon works came from the collection of drawings, pastels and collages given by the painter to his Italian friend Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino, which gave the show its idea, and they were hung among the frescoes and stucco decorations of the palace rooms.

Federico Clapis took part with The Crucifixion of the Artist. The video documentation shows the work in one of the decorated rooms of the palace: a small, pale figure with outstretched arms is fixed to the back of a large canvas, where the wooden stretcher bars form the cross, lit by a cold bluish light beneath the ornate stucco ceiling. The painter's own support becomes the instrument of martyrdom, and the figure seems to read as a self-portrait of the artist sacrificed to his work.

The presentation belongs to the early phase of Clapis' career, when he had recently left his work as a video creator to devote himself to sculpture and installation. Placing a young artist's take on the crucifixion beside one of the twentieth century's most influential interpreters of the theme gave the piece a demanding context, and anticipated the attention to art history, the body and spirituality that recurs in his later work.

Sources

• Crocifissioni + Crucifixions: Pozzati, Nitsch and Bacon on show — Droste Effect Magazine