Roma/New York, 1953–1964

Wednesday, February 8, 2023
6PM Doors; 6:30PM Start
New York | 537 West 20th Street
RSVP at events@davidzwirner.com

Featuring artists including Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as their Italian contemporaries such as Alberto Burri and Carla Accardi, Roma/New York, 1953–1964 explores the rich intellectual and artistic cross-pollination between artists in the centers of Italian and American art in the 1950s and 1960s. Curated by gallery partner David Leiber, Roma/New York, 1953–1964 was named as a must see exhibition in Artforum’s New York Art Guide.

Join us for a panel discussion in celebration of the exhibition, led by Massimiliano Gioni, the Edlis Neeson Artistic Director of the New Museum. Gioni will be in conversation with renowned artist Peter Saul, Claire Gilman, Chief Curator at The Drawing Center, Antonio Monda, founder and Artistic Director of Le Conversazioni, and David Leiber, partner at David Zwirner. The panelists will discuss Italian painting, cinema, literature, and the dynamic culture surrounding the historical cafes in Piazza del Popolo, which served as a meeting point for artists, filmmakers, and intellectuals at a time when Rome emerged as the center of a new avant-garde.

About the Speakers

Massimiliano Gioni 
Massimiliano Gioni is the Edlis Neeson Artistic Director of the New Museum in New York where he has curated numerous exhibitions including solo shows by John Akomfrah, Lynda Benglis, Nicole Eisenman, Theaster Gates, Hans Haacke, Kapwani Kiwanga, Ragnar Kjartansson, Sarah Lucas, Marta Minujin, Albert Oehlen, Chris Ofili, Raymond Pettibon, Carol Rama, Faith Ringgold, Pipilotti Rist, Anri Sala, Peter Saul, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Nari Ward, and many others. At the New Museum he has also organized numerous group shows including Ghosts in the Machine, The Keeper, Ostalgia, and was part of the curatorial team that supervised the realization of Okwui Enwezor's posthumous exhibition Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America.

Gioni is also the director of the Trussardi Foundation, which organizes exhibitions and public art projects in public spaces, symbolic locations, and forgotten palazzos in the city of Milan. He has organized numerous international exhibitions including: Manifesta 5 (2004, with Marta Kuzma), the 6th Berlin Biennale (with Maurizio Cattelan and Ali Subotnick), the 1st New Museum Triennial (with Lauren Cornell and Laura Hoptman), the 8th Gwangju Biennale (2010), the 55th Venice Biennale (2013), The Great Mother on the occasion of the International Expo in Milan (2015), and The Restless Earth at the Milan Triennale (2017). Recent international exhibitions include George Condo: The Picture Gallery at the Long Museum in Shanghai (2021), Jeff Koons: Lost in America at Al Riwaq in Doha,Qatar (2021), and Dark Light: Realism in the Age of Post-Truths at the Aishti Foundation in Beirut, Lebanon.
 
Claire Gilman 
Claire Gilman is Chief Curator at The Drawing Center in New York. Over the past twelve years, she has overseen the museum’s curatorial program, organizing more than forty exhibitions and public programs and authoring nearly as many catalogues. She has organized projects that range from the first solo museum shows of artists like Huguette Caland (first US museum show), Torkwase Dyson, Natalie Frank, Eddie Martinez and Curtis Talwst Santiago, to new considerations of work by established artists such as Cecily Brown, Rashid Johnson, and Terry Winters, as well as conceptually-driven group shows including Ways of Seeing: Three Takes on the Jack Shear Drawing Collection (October, 2021-February, 2022), The Pencil Is a Key: Drawings by Incarcerated Artists (2019) (co-organized with The Drawing Center’s curatorial team), and For Opacity: Elijah Burgher, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and Toyin Ojih Odutola (2018). Gilman holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and has taught art history and critical theory at Columbia; the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; the Corcoran College of Art and Design; The Museum of Modern Art; and the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in addition to lecturing on modern and contemporary art throughout the country and overseas. She has written for Art Journal, CAA Reviews, Documents, Frieze, and October and has authored numerous essays for art books and museum exhibitions. Her book Drawing in the Present Tense, co-authored with Roger Malbert, is forthcoming from Thames and Hudson.

David Leiber
David Leiber, a partner at David Zwirner in New York, works closely with The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, The Estate of Diane Arbus, and major collectors of work by Giorgio Morandi, as well as the contemporary artist Liu Ye. In addition to curating Giorgio Morandi: Late Paintings in 2015 and Albers and Morandi: Never Finished in 2021, he has overseen numerous exhibitions at the gallery, including Endless Enigma: Eight Centuries of Fantastic Art (2018), Juan Muñoz: Seven Rooms (2022), Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited (2022), and Joan Mitchell: Paintings, 1979–1985 (2022). In 2023, David curated the gallery's Roma/New York, 1953–1964 exhibition, exploring the significant intellectual and artistic cross-pollination between artists in the centers of Italian and American art in the 1950s and 1960s. 

Antonio Monda
Antonio Monda is the founder and Artistic Director of Le Conversazioni and has directed the Rome Film Festival between 2015 and 2021. He has curated exhibitions for the MoMA, the Guggenheim and the Lincoln Center. He teaches at NYU and is a columnist for RAI and a regular contributor for La Repubblica. The ninth chapter of his ten-volume saga about New York will be published in March. His books have been translated into eleven languages.

Peter Saul
Throughout his decades-long career, Peter Saul (b. 1934) has pitilessly portrayed a wide range of topics from American politics, to the consumerism of post-war society, as well as art history and the role of the artist, consistently imbuing each work with his singular vision. Covering the Vietnam War, racism, police brutality, religion, and almost every American president from Nixon to Trump, Saul’s work is at once prescient and timeless.

Since his first solo exhibition in 1961, Saul’s work has been exhibited throughout the world. His paintings are found in numerous museum collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Recent important exhibitions include Peter Saul at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, Pop, Funk, Bad Painting and More at Les Abattoirs in Toulouse and Le Delta in Namur, and his first retrospective in New York, Peter Saul: Crime and Punishment at the New Museum.