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This volume recapitulates ten years of activity (1993-2003) at the celebrated gallery of contemporary art Il Ponte, in Rome: 10 years that reflect the rapid change of stance that contemporary art has undergone and provides a fairly complete picture of the greater part of the second half of last century’s art.
As Alice Rubbini recalls, in these ten years the Gallery has hosted them all, from the most well-known to the debutants, so they could work and meet, out of curiosity, respect or esteem: Pierre et Gilles, Inez van Lamsweerde, Donald Lipsky, Maurizio Mochetti and Vettor Pisani.
Il Ponte gallery has always shown an interest in new media, photography, video and new technologies of painting, discovering artists and often introducing artists already known abroad to the Italian scene.
As Achille Bonito Oliva explains in his essay “in the second half of the twentieth century globalisation has left its mark on the production of contemporary art and its international circulation, establishing a hegemony of trends and movements based on the experimental research of the neo-avant-garde. The Art system came into being, a united chain of interacting functions, or subjects, each one lending his/her very own professional capacity. The artist creates, the critic analyses, the gallerist exhibits, the collector gathers, the museum makes history, the mass-medium celebrates and the public contemplates. In this way production, circulation and consumption find their natural context in the Art System which lends added value, a plus, to the works, the path to an economically and culturally certified statute. This system has seen the supremacy of the galleries during the sixties, the critics in the seventies, the collectors during the eighties and the museums in the final decade of the century. Now in the new millennium this privilege seems to have shifted towards the public, encouraged by an Art system which is centred on producing communication based on performative and spectacular works, against a mediatic industry which cultivates the public’s skin-deep sensitivity towards glittering multimedia products for ready consumption. The Art system of the twenty-first century is therefore multicultural, trans-national and multimedial, absolutely mirroring a highly progressively computerised context.
In the decade between 1993 and 2003 Il Ponte has hosted exhibitions which clearly document this scenario and, living up to its name, the bridge, has been a place of transit, exchange and contact for international artists of several generations.”

Rome, Galleria Il Ponte
18 December 2003 – February 2004

The volume is available at the bookstore in via Torino 61, Milan and from April 2005 in all Italian bookshops.