Matteo Negri, THE WEAPONS ROOM

Room 5

«They were certainly happy days when I discovered the technique of ceramics, firing procedures, hot and cold pigmentation techniques, gilding and third-firing. Violent mines that reminded me of balloons or crystal balls, into which I could put anything I wanted. Experimenting with ancient forms that came back to me as friends of the same age and that had always been present in my life. Initially, my sculptures appeared as closed coloured spheres with a mirrored surface, interrupted here and there by mechanical grafts, decorated like ancient rosettes; then I began to break the spheres and explode bombs, and to build architecture inside them, other worlds.»
Matteo Negri

«At a certain point in the autumn, white ceramic sculptures came out of the boot of his car: a sudden but consistent leap in quality. There was an immediate awareness of having found the right path. And, at the same time, the discovery of the ovens, of the cooking processes, of Curti’s world. And the challenge of the colours, which, overwhelming at such high temperatures, lead to unexpected sentimental inversions.»
Giovanni Agosti

THE ARTIST

Matteo Negri was born in San Donato Milanese in 1982. He graduated in Sculpture from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and now lives and works in Milan. He is the author of a plastic research interested in the expressive potential of the mechanical object, capturing its organic and architectural essence, suggesting a sort of familiarity between contemporary forms and those of the past. He worked for a long time on the theme of Bombs, sculptures that he exhibited in 2006 in the exhibition Piccolo Paesaggio at the Obraz Gallery in Milan, in 2007 at the Annovi Gallery in Sassuolo and the following year in Bergamo, at the Oratory of San Lupo. In 2009 he exhibited L’Ego at the Eos Gallery in Milan.