Bassiri Foundation. A new contemporary art center in Umbria

The Bassiri Foundation opens its doors to Fabro.

A new center dedicated to contemporary art, among the suggestive hills of Umbria. On Saturday, October 16, in Fabro, in the province of Terni, the Bassiri Foundation, established in July 2020 for the management, conservation and dissemination of the work of Byzantine Bassiri, artist born in Tehran in 1954 and who, since 1975, has lived and worked in Rome, Fabro and Tehran. Bassiri and Cionini Visani stretcher I am the founder and president and vice president and general manager of the Foundation, respectively. The scientific direction was entrusted to Bruno Corà, which also chairs the Scientific Committee formed by Michelle Coudray, president of Archivio Jannis Kounellis, Thierry Dufrene, professor of art history at Paris Nanterre University, Lars Müller, emeritus director of the Bornholm Art Museum, Nicholas Sani, composer and director of the Chigiana Academy of Music Foundation. To assist the activity of the Founders, is a Board of Directors formed by Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, Bruno Corà, Gianluca Comin, Elena Di Giovanni, Gohar Homayounpour, Maria Letizia Magaldi, Catia Tomasetti and Rosalba Veltri.

The Foundation has its headquarters in an industrial shed of 4300 square meters, which also houses his studio and where, on the occasion of the public opening on October 16, the cycle of great works dedicated to the theme of the "Storm" is presented. But the program of initiatives will also expand to the Museo del Duomo in Città della Pieve, with the exhibition “Dimora della Sorte”, curated by Bruno Corà. Dedicated to the patron saints of the ancient village in the province of Perugia, the church is rich in works of art from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as the Baptism of Christ and the Madonna in glory among saints, by Perugino.

Tireless experimenter with materials, from papier-mâché to steel, from bronze to photographic elaborations, Bassiri also works with the magical poetry of words. The artist is, in fact, the author of "Magmatic Thought", a sequence of poetic writings which later merged into the "Manifesto of Magmatic Thought". In these texts we can trace the motivations of Bassiri's artistic research, which arose from an "illumination" that occurred at the sight of the crater of Vesuvius and from the idea that the work of art is a manifestation of cosmic energy. «In Bassiri's Magmatic Thought, art and the entire formative process of the work, like the volcano and its catastrophic activity, are at the origin of the qualitative metamorphosis of matter», Corà writes. «It is through the transformative action impressed by the artist on the materials chosen by him, so that they are vehicles of the intensity and sensitive frequency of his imagination, that the work erupts into the light and surprises everyone. Bizhan Bassiri's art is chthonic, but also solar ». «In the first point of Magmatic Thought it is written that the image precedes knowledge», explains Bassiri. «The author is a prisoner of the images that anticipate him and does nothing but give substance to this incessant and incandescent rain. It reassures me to see that from now on the core of the fusion has a home forever ».

The ambition of the Bassiri Foundation is to become an active and proactive subject in the contemporary panorama, promoting a series of multidisciplinary initiatives, including art, music, theater and literature. An impulse will also be given to research, teaching and training activities, with the organization of art schools and workshops for children and adults, in collaboration with cultural, scientific and museum institutions both in Italy and in the world.

In particular, the Foundation aims to organize an annual multidisciplinary event where art, music, theater and cinema will dialogue. Attention will be given to contemporary poetry and literature through FB Editori, the publishing house of the Foundation directed by Aldo Iori in order to sensitize the public not to perceive these fields of study and research as divided and fragmentary but as a whole that, in the contamination with the visual arts, leads to the establishment of new paths and research paths.

 

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