STUDY PROGRAMME
Painting and Visual Arts

AFAM CODE
ABAV5

DISCIPLINARY AREA
Painting

DISCIPLINARY FIELD
Painting

CREDITS
12

APPROACH
Theoretical / Project based

Following the first two years of experimentation, the students are encouraged to explore various aspects of the pictorial language, integrating these into their own personal research, and creating meaning. The course analyses modern painting in-depth, while focusing on personal research. Attention will also be focused on the latest new pictorial scene in order to model a complex gaze capable of deciphering contemporaneity. A careful selection of artists will be presented to the class. Periodically, a selection of key figures relevant to the current pictorial theory and practice will be welcomed as guests to the course. In light of the final examination, the course aims to instill an aptitude for criticism and self-criticism. The course revolves around personal research and continuous exchange of ideas with the course lecturer, and the students are asked to discuss their own development path with the class.

In the Display module, with the goal to make the students acquainted with the artistic production processes, including the contemporary exhibition systems, the course focuses on the practices and models employed to create exhibition spaces, analysing typical examples and case studies in relation to the history of exhibitions and curatorial methodology from the beginning of the 20th Century to the present day. This course, divided into thematic units, is designed to provide students with the methodological tools for navigating through the history of exhibitions and in debates on curatorial practices, enabling them to create a field of research and experimentation suited to their work. Through lectures and practical workshops, the course programme aims at showing the students how the 20th Century art history is full of attempts to modify the relationship between the development of artistic practices and a new experimental concept of exhibitions. This awareness is crucial to enable the students to contemplate the spatial devices which determine the relation between works, presentation and visitors. In fact, these relationships define the sequence and configuration of the works, attributing a role and a specific meaning to them.

The total credits for this course are 12, divided as follows:

• Painting 3: 8 Cfa

• Display: 4 Cfa

The course helps the students structure and increase their technical-expressive as well as visual-communicative skills, providing tools to build, deepen, experiment with and expand their own artistic path.

• The Painting 3 module intends to further refine and fine-tune the artistic path already undertaken by each student, focusing on creative, technical, formal and set-up aspects in order to provide the latest stimuli in preparation for the public presentation of their work. Thanks to the exhibition and presentation of their works and artistic portfolio, this module acts as the last laboratory in view of a subsequent academic or professional career.

• The Display module focuses on the term “Display”, which in the exhibition context indicates the act of delimiting, defining a space, but also opening it to distribute the objects contained in it to the gaze and body of the observers. In this sense, the display can be considered as an active, responsible, in many cases collective operation, built around human behaviour aimed at perceiving and understanding objects in a given perspective. Decentralized exhibition forms, exhibition actions as artistic practice, as well as the analysis of key terms such as “work”, “exhibition”, “display”, and the concept of “white cube”, are the basis of the lessons cycle that ends with the presentation of the students’ research work.

• Theoretical/project based classroom lectures

• Workshops

• Use of tutorials, videos or other media tools for detailed study

• Classroom debates and presentations

• Individual study and research

• Field trips (conferences, meetings, visits to exhibitions as organized by the professor or department)

Assessment is based on the overall competence of the students and may include:

• Oral exam

• Written exam

• Submission of papers, projects or research work

Further details on specific tests can be provided by the professor during the course. Assessment criteria include commitment, active participation and personal growth of the students over the course.

• Agemben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.

• Agemben, What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, Meridian.

• Deleuze, What is philosophy?.

• Brian O’Doerthy, Inside the white cube, chap 2.3.

Further bibliographic recommendations may be provided by the professor during the course. A lot of the referenced material, together with other in-depth study material, can be consulted online in MyNaba, in the Library section.