Meccanismo

As in past editions of Museo Segreto, a sculpture from the “Collection of Contemporary Art” of Giuseppe Mangini, the founder’s son, is proposed, generally excluded from visits as it is located on the fourth floor of the Casa Museo, accessible with difficulty.
Meccanismo by Gloria Argelés, an Argentine artist born in Córdoba in 1940, trained in the best art schools in Buenos Aires, and winner of a scholarship to Italy in 1970, which led her to Europe and settled in Rome in 1973, will be exceptionally visible. Her first Italian solo exhibition was at the Galleria Gian Ferrari in Milan in 1977, where Giuseppe likely met her, purchasing the striking “Mechanism” the following year, which crushes a man's head like a horizontal press operated by a hand through a large screw. With this work, Argelés seems to venture into the realms of Dadaist aesthetics, also recalling socio-political-cultural messages from the early century, particularly Raoul Haussmann’s “Mechanical Head” from 1919, which expresses the idea of the individual reduced to a victim of mechanization. Furthermore, the exhibited work, created during the Argentine dictatorship, seems to update the message: it is impossible not to read the same tension for social and political justice that determined the production of the greatest Argentine artists for years.
Argelés then participated in important exhibitions: in Rome (“Art and Critique 1980”), Brussels (Galerie Rencontre, 1984), Bienne-Biel in Switzerland (1991), and Germany in 1994. In 2001, her solo exhibition “H-ombre” was inaugurated at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, and in 2011 she was invited to exhibit at the Italian Pavilion of the 54th Venice Biennale, culminating in 2018 with the presentation of BABELE, a solo exhibition of works from the last two decades, organized by the Museum of Rome in Trastevere: a great and well-deserved milestone for the nearly eighty-year-old Argentine artist!