MATtam 60

Manto Arte Temporanea | Temporary Art Manto
short exhibitions in found spaces

Tinelli di Palazzo Te | Mantova

Charles Clough

Clufffalo:Numbers

Sunday February 26th 2023
only between 10:30 AM and 1:00 PM

In response to the trend to lock art exclusively into social or political programs, the artist wrote: "The Political Value of Art is Beauty as a Symbol of Love". He is intensely committed to art making in the form of painting by working solo and also in groups. He writes: "In the Historic landmark building the Roycroft, in Buffalo, I present a Public Painting Workshop 'Clufffalo: Season' in which I collaborate with participants from 2 to 98 years old". "I inhabit the painterly" he wrote.
He has persisted year after year filling small and large flat surfaces of all kinds with bright colored enamel paint and latex shapes in monumental or intimate compositions. Clough has traversed the fashionable decades dominated by theories and agendas, reaffirming the power of painting as such and could do so by coming to it with a hands-off attitude that allows ultimate concentration.
"The works in latex on pvc that I now exhibit for MATtam at Palazzo Te are from 'Clufffalo: Numbers', painted by me alone as my contribution to the question: what is painting today?"
www.clufff.com

Charles Clough was born in Buffalo, New York in 1951. Lives and works in Buffalo. Starting in 1978, he lived for many years in New York City. Has taught at Columbia University and Rhode Island School of Design. Was the recipient of Guggenheim, National Endowment, New York State, Pollock Krasner and many other grants and fellowships. Has had innumerable exhibitions. His art is included in the collection of 70 museums, including Metropolitan Museum, New York, National Gallery, Washington. In 1974 Clough founded the legendary art center Hallwalls in Buffalo, with Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman, Nancy Dwyer, Michael Zwack, examining art making from an alternative perspective. The group was central to the seminal exhibition "The Pictures Generation" at the Metropolitan Museum in 2009. He is one of the few artists the collectors Dorothy and Herbert Vogel concentrated on with ca. 600 works of each (Sol Lewitt, Richard Tuttle, Lucio Pozzi, Robert Mangold).

"It overlaps, expands, branches out, thickens, and yet another thousand varieties of life the color takes on to narrate its epic." Donata Negrini

Co-production with