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Pietro Ruffo
The last marvellous minute

29.10.2024__16.02.2025

Curated by Sébastien Delot
 

Exhibition promoted by Assessorato alla Cultura di Roma Capitale and Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, produced and organized by Azienda Speciale Palaexpo 

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Pietro Ruffo The last marvellous minute29 October 2024__16 February 2025
“If we boil down the Universe’s 13.8 billion years to a period of twelve months, the dinosaurs would appear around Christmas time – unbelievable! – while the first Homo Sapiens would only arrive on the scene a few minutes before the New Year’s fireworks”
Rebecca Wragg Sykes

 

Pietro Ruffo’s L'ultimo meraviglioso minuto (the wonderful last minute) is the largest exhibition ever yet devoted to the artist by any public institution.

Pietro Ruffo asks questions about man’s impact on planet Earth, exploring the legitimacy of the term Anthropocene and condensing the history of our planet and knowledge in the works on display in the exhibition.

The exhibition unfolds in the large hall on the first floor of the Palazzo Esposizioni and in the three rooms adjacent to it. In the large hall, Le Monde Avant la Création de l’Homme, a work fully 21 metres long, is set in an immersive installation entitled The Wonderful Last Minute that recreates the atmosphere of a primeval forest. Inside it, visitors can wander around amid testimonials of ancient history conjured up by circular works entitled De Hortus.
The exhibition moves on to explore the earliest traces left by mankind, revisited in the shape of five large pictures from the artist’s Anthropocene Prehistory cycle.

Visitors are then invited to embrace the awareness of time by immersing themselves in a video installation entitled The Planetary Garden, realized in collaboration with Noruwei, in which prehistory, the present and the future are all linked in a single stratified horizon.

The exhibition winds up with a reflection on Rome, viewed and broken down into its various historical and geological phases – a visual palimpsest created expressly for Palazzo Esposizioni, bringing together millennia of evolution under a single gaze.

In the words of exhibition curator Sébastien Delot, "the capability of human thought" lies in "suddenly bringing to the surface of consciousness a knowlege that appeared to have plummeted into a bottomless pit".

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue edited by Sébastien Delot, with essays by the curator, by Guido Rebecchini, by Rebecca Wragg Sykes and by Sofia Di Gravio, edited by Drago.


Pietro Ruffo, photo Giorgio Benni
 
Pietro Ruffo
(Rome, 1978); graduated in architecture from the University of Roma Tre, he won the Cairo Prize in 2009 and the New York Prize in 2010 and he received a research scholarship from the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University.

The relationship with the images is an integral part of his research itinerary, which stems from a series of philosophical, social and ethical considerations and is developed through a profound conceptual dimension of art that stem from his training as an architect.

For Ruffo, drawing and carving are instruments of a research that analyses historical and contemporary dynamics, giving shape to installations that take on environmental dimensions. The artworks are articulated in superimpositions of natural landscapes and human forms, geographical maps and constellations, geometries and traces of writing. The result is a stratified work with multiple visual and semantic layers that investigates the great themes of universal history, in particular freedom and dignity of the individual. In recent years he has exhibited at major international museums and institutions including: Biennale di Venezia, Italy; Musei Vaticani, Vatican City; Museu de Arte Contemporânea de la Universidad de São Paulo, Brazil; Galleria Borghese, Italy; Zhejiang Art Museum (ZAM), Hangzhou City, China; MUSA Museo de las Artes Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico; IA&A AT HILLYER, Washington DC, USA;  MAXXI-Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Italy; Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Italy; The Bardo National Museum, Tunis, Tunisia; Indian Museum, Calcutta, India; Reggia Contemporanea, Villa Reale di Monza, Italy; Triennale di Milano, italy; Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City.

He has received several important public commissions, which have led him to expand his work into an urban dimension. 

In 2006, he created the confessionals for the Church of the Holy Face of Jesus in Rome designed by Architects Sartogo and Grenon.

In 2019-2020 - on the centenary of the Garbatella garden district - together with 100 students of the department of Architecture of Roma Tre, he realized a work on the idea of reconstructing, preserving and transmitting the cultural heritage of places, marking the stratified urban spaces, modelled on the entire depth of the culture of social groups.

In 2021 he realized the work Migrante, for the Parco dei Daini at Villa Borghese in Rome.

In 2024 he has created a large installation for the 60th Venice Biennale.

Some of his works are in important public and private collections including: Musei Vaticani; Farnesina Collection of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation; MIMS Ministero delle infrastrutture e dei trasporti; MAXXI - Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo; Fondazione Roma Tre; Teatro Palladium; MAR - Museo d'Arte della città di Ravenna; Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Bilotti, UniCredit Collection, Deutsche Bank Collection; Villa Firenze, Italian Embassy in Washington, USA; Italian Embassy in Canberra, Australia; Italian Embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania.