ART CITIES: Seoul-Salvo
Throughout Salvo’s career, the artist pursued a spiritual connection with the world of antiquity and explored themes of temporality and materiality. Salvo’s practice evolved from provocative conceptual sculptures and political self-portraiture to ‘capricci’ paintings that were formative to his lifelong body of work. Salvo’s fascination by the marriage of architecture, archeological ruins, and landscapes into the mythological compositions of ‘capricci’ brought the past into conversation with the present.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gladstone Gallery Archive
Spanning works from 1988 to 2015, the exhibition “Salvo, in Viaggio” surveys the artist’s compositions of real and imagined landscapes inspired by his travels across the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and Asia. The exhibition brings together paintings that reveal the indelible impact of the artist’s frequent and far-reaching adventures on his practice and offers reflections on the relationship between memory, reality, and imagination. Salvo, born Salvatore Mangione, emerged within Turin’s flourishing Arte Povera movement following a decade of social and political upheaval in Italy. While Salvo’s early practice was largely conceptual, marked by experimentation across various media, he pivoted to figurative painting in 1973, initially to engage in a dialogue with art history through his “d’après” series. By 1976, his work evolved further, giving rise to vibrant, saturated landscapes that recalled the work of avant-garde predecessors including Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà. Salvo’s paintings, alongside observational drawings and quick sketches, investigated abstract notions such as the passage of time and memory, while also reflecting his boundless curiosity and drive to explore distant places .The exhibition traces the longstanding influence of Salvo’s travels–both literal and metaphorical– on his painterly practice, through a selection of works that bridge remembered sites and imagined landscapes. Beginning with his first trip to Afghanistan in the summer of 1969, Salvo’s frequent journeys became a recurring source of inspiration. The artist’s paintings depicted scenes from areas he lived and visited with great specificity, referencing regional architectural motifs and native vegetation species. In 1974, he visited Morocco with longtime friend Alighiero Boetti, and the following decade his trips to Greece, Turkey, and former Yugoslavia led to the incorporation of minarets into his works, a defining motif in his Ottomania (a neologism coined by Salvo). Salvo continued his extensive travels in the 1990s, visiting Oman, Syria, Tibet, Nepal, as well as much of Europe, creating several paintings devoted to some of these destinations. Late in life, Salvo painted Khiva (2015), an Uzbekistan city he only dreamed of visiting. Throughout his oeuvre, Salvo embraced a number of themes he would frequently revisit, including Ottomania, Capricci (classical columns and archeological ruins), Valli (mountain vistas in different seasons) and Mediterranei (Mediterranean scenes). Rendered in their essential forms, these subjects embodied the artist’s distinctive visual aesthetic, characterized by expressive landscapes in vivid color. The exhibition presents a breadth of paintings spanning geographic, cultural, and temporal dimensions that underscore the artist’s singular and lasting impact on Italian Contemporary Art.
Photo: Salvo, Giugno, 2009, Oil on canvas, 13 3/ Salvo Estate 8 x 19 inches (34 x 48 cm), © Salvo Estate, Courtesy Salvo Estate & Gladstone Gallery
Info: Gladstone Gallery, 760, Samseong-ro, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea, Duration: 29/5-12/7/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gladstonegallery.com/
