Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Roberto Cuoghi, Adelita Husni-Bey

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Il mondo magico (The Magical World) presents the work and research of three Italian artists who demonstrate a new faith in the transformative power of the imagination and an interest in magic. Through myriad references to fancy, fantasy, and fable, they turn art into a tool for inhabiting the world in all its richness and multiplicity. The title of the exhibition is borrowed from the book ‘Il mondo magico’ by Neapolitan scholar Ernesto de Martino, who conducted seminal research into the anthropological function of magic. De Martino spent years studying a range of rituals, describing them as a means through which individuals try to regain control in times of uncertainty and reassert their presence in the world. Within the landscape of contemporary Italian art, Andreotta Calò, Cuoghi, and Husni-Bey use magic as a cognitive and expressive device for reconstructing reality, forging complex personal cosmologies. For these three artists, magic is not an escape into the depths of irrationality so much as a new way of experiencing the world.