‘Live fast, die young’ does tend to create a legend. Italian artist Pino Pascali exhibited for only four years before being killed in a motorbike crash, aged 32, in 1968. Yet today, Fondazione Prada in Milan has dedicated four of its extensive main show spaces to an exhibition honouring his work.
Born in Bari in 1935, Pascali graduated in stage design and sculpture at Rome’s Accademia di Belle Arti in 1959. Miuccia Prada writes in the exhibition catalogue’s introduction of his ‘inexhaustible instinct to rethink’. The Fondazione show’s curator Mark Godfrey, an art historian formerly at Tate, says that Pascali ‘wanted to get away from the idea of a signature style, reinventing his art after each major public outing. He once compared himself to a snake shedding his skin.’ He did have a style though, albeit a serpentine one, which this generous exhibition lets speak for itself. Spread throughout the sensational Rem Koolhaas-designed complex, the first part recreates his solo shows, the second is an examination of his materials, the third a conversational exercise alongside works by his peers, and the fourth a sequence of his most extroverted installations set against XL portraits of the no less performative artist himself posing by each with comedic verve.
