Galleria Raffaella Cortese continues its focus on Simone Forti’s work through a third exhibition dedicated to the artist and conceived in conversation with the Roman the art dealer Fabio Sargentini, who in 1968 presented Forti’s work in his gallery L’Attico, when the artist performed for the first time in Europe.

The main intention of the exhibition, which is developed in the two street-facing spaces of the gallery, is to show the uniqueness of Simone Forti’s artistic career by placing attention on the materialization of movement process, that is, the artist’s extraordinary ability to bring to life the gestural expressiveness to which the work, even of a non- performative nature, refers.

A process that confirms the absolute centrality of gesture, revealing the expressive medium used as incessantly trembling and allowing the cardinal aspects of Forti’s research - kinaesthetic awareness, centrality of the body and its radiated connection to the world, qualitative movement, the animal studies, the ritualisation of movement as well as the binomial freedom-captivity, the boundary between subject and object, the profound analysis of gesture conditioned by illness - to vibrate incessantly on the surface of the work.

The venue in via Stradella 1 focuses mainly on the prolonged study of the animals and their unconditioned movements undertaken by Simone Forti in 1968. This in- depth research can be seen in the series Tree Drawing: I Stand Where a Bear Stood Clawing This Tree of 2010, an intimate and poetic work on the artist’s almost physical relationship with these mighty animals, and in the polyptych Animal Study - Oxen, Turkey, Ostrich (1982) drawings that mark the beginning of the use of language in the artist’s work and show the attempt to transcribe the wholeness of animal bodies and their fluidity by relating their movements to their communication systems, for a study on the relationship between dance and speech.

In 1974, the artist expressed his vision of the drama of captivity in the video Twirling Bears - a title that emphasises a functional survival ritual - in which the camera relentlessly follows three grizzly bears at the Central Park Zoo as they twist, turn and shake behind a cage, making the sense of imprisonment, boredom and physical despair extremely palpable.

Works from the series Anatomy Maps (1985), where the close correlation between body and world - and, therefore, belonging - is evident, will be on view at Via Stradella 4. These works are the result of the experimental anatomy studies carried out by Simone Forti together with Anna Halprin, an occasion that gave the artist the opportunity to study in a detailed and tactile way the skeleton in its astonishing complexity and above all the way in which it is glued to the muscles and connects to the other components of the body, detecting an atavistic similarity with the earth and superimposing the cavities of the bones to the infinite paths of the globe.

On view also a series of photographs showing a sequence of performance acts at Fabio Sargentini’s L’Attico gallery in February 1969. In these images, the artist performs among the objects in the gallery. The materials in the space are the detritus of a disassembled piece by Mario Merz - who had an exhibition at L’Attico that same month - and Forti engaged directly with the remains, reusing and activating some of Merz’s elements to transform them from sculptures into elements of dance.

A text written by Sargentini will accompany the exhibition, shedding light on some key passages of the artist’s research, intertwined with their professional and human relationship.