Bartolomeo Sala
Bartolomeo Sala is a literary scout, freelance reader, and reviewer based in London.
Georges de La Tour: L'Europa della Luce
By Bartolomeo SalaGeorges de La Tour. L’Europa della luce—the artist’s first retrospective in Italy bringing together 16 works out of the 40-odd ones that survived to this day—sheds further light on de La Tour by placing him side by side with other artists who made the 17th century “the golden age of nocturne.”
Global Alt Comics
By Bartolomeo SalaTucked into one of the many galleries of Mana Contemporary, a tobacco warehouse now repurposed as a creative hub in Jersey City, Global Alt Comics, on view at Scott Eder Gallery and curated by Alessandra Sternfeld, showcased work by seven female cartoonists and one queer cartoonist. Staples of the American underground, Mary Fleener and Trina Robbins, rising stars Lauren Weinstein and Gina Wynbrandt, voices of the international comics scene, such as Colombian-Ecuadorian Power Paola, Australian Tommi Parrish, and Catalan Conxita Herrero, and memoirist Gabrielle Bell, all found a spot in this exhibition, whose title was originally supposed to be “All Girl Thrills” after an all-female anthology edited by Robbins, sketches of which were also on view.
Public Images
By Bartolomeo SalaPublic Images, a virtual exhibition now on view on the website of New York gallery Carriage Trade, a space that often interrogates big social and political issues, bursts precisely this “frictionless” conception of city-dwelling, exposing it as the ultimate illusion.
Don McCullin
By Bartolomeo SalaFew photographers have taken as many iconic photographs as Don McCullin (b. 1935). Think of the Vietnam War, and Shellshocked US Marine, The Battle of Hue (1968) will very likely pop up.
CONDO London 2020
By Bartolomeo SalaWhen CONDO first appeared in London in 2016, the idea behind the collaborative show envisioned by gallerist Vanessa Carlos was to provide galleries losing out to an increasingly return-on-investment-driven art market with a platform that would foster creative collaboration and experimental daring.
Peter Kennard: On Hannah Arendt: ‘The Concept of History’
By Bartolomeo SalaIn the three bodies of work on display, which span the artist’s more-than-50-year career—Kennard portrays humanity as a faceless mass in the thrall of greater impersonal forces: militarism, repressive state apparatuses, unfettered markets, austerity.
Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948 - 1980
By Bartolomeo SalaAs curators Martino Stierli and Vladimir Kulić illustrate, in Tito’s Yugoslavia, architecture was not only viewed as a way to reconstruct a physically ravaged country, and promote Pan-Slavic identity; it was also believed to be capable of making the abstract idea of a better society tangible.
William Blake
By Bartolomeo SalaSince his death in relative obscurity in 1827, William Blake has experienced a continuous revival that has turned him into a sort of artists’ patron saint, or as DJ and producer Martha Pazienti Caidan calls him, perhaps half-cheekily, “a pioneer of slasher culture.”
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly in League With the Night
By Bartolomeo SalaIn a world in which Blackness continues to be fetishized and objectified even when it is celebrated—Yiadom-Boakye’s oil paintings carve out a space where Black personhood, “unconstrained by the nightmare fantasies of others,” is finally afforded the luxury to be, to breathe.
Quemar para sembrar: Pablo Larraín’s Ema
By Bartolomeo SalaSet in the cultural heart of El Valparaíso, Chile, it tells the story of Ema (Mariana di Girolamo)—a young dancer who, in an attempt to reunite with the adopted son she previously returned to social services, breaks away from the curbing influence of her husband and Pygmalion.
Nothing Personal
By Bartolomeo SalaWhen Nothing Personal first came out in 1964—just months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the assassination of President Kennedy—it was meant by its authors, the photographer Richard Avedon and the writer James Baldwin, as a blow to American myths and lies which, in their view, concealed a wasteland of loneliness and despair.
