G. Condo, S. Gomez, N. Party, J. Semmel, S.Ruby, J. Smith and C. Wool in Day for Night: New American Realism
14 April—14 July 2024
Group Exhibition at Palazzo Barberini, Rome, Italy
The Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, in collaboration with Beirut’s Aïshti Foundation, present the exhibition Day for Night: New American Realism, curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Flaminia Gennari Santori. The exhibition features more than 150 works by American artists from the Tony and Elham Salamé collection.
The exhibition takes its title from a work featured in the Salamé collection by New York artist Lorna Simpson. Day for Night—in Italian, “Effetto notte”—is a cinematic effect that allows night scenes to be filmed in daylight. The title was also made famous by a 1973 film by François Truffaut, and in French, the day-for-night effect is called “La Nuit Américaine,” or “the American night.” This image is well-suited to the chiaroscuro visions of the artists included in Day for Night, who, in recent decades, have captured the reality of the United States in all its blinding complexity.
Palazzo Barberini will host a selection of works by US-based artists—including, among many others, Cecily Brown, George Condo, Nicole Eisenman, Urs Fischer, Sayre Gomez, Wade Guyton, Julie Mehretu, Laura Owens, Nicolas Party, Richard Prince, Charles Ray, David Salle, Dana Schutz, Joan Semmel, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Josh Smith, Henry Taylor, and Christopher Wool—whose work interrogates the meanings and functions of figuration in contemporary art, addressing crucial questions around the notion of realism and the representation of truth in contemporary painting.