Emilio Isgrò — America (2023)

America (2023) is a work by Emilio Isgrò (Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto, 1937), one of the most authoritative and original figures in Italian and international conceptual art. Painter, poet, writer and playwright, Isgrò has spent more than sixty years interrogating the relationship between word, image and meaning, and in the 1960s he gave Italian art one of its most recognisable vocabularies: the cancellatura, erasure as a language.

In his practice erasure is never subtraction for its own sake. What is cancelled does not disappear; it acquires a new presence, and the gesture becomes an act of revelation that reopens the relationship between memory, identity and knowledge. America takes that reflection to the scale of a name: a continent, but also an image built over centuries through narratives of discovery, transformation, freedom and power.

The work is a mixed media on canvas mounted on a wooden frame, 118 × 81 cm, dated 2023 and belonging to the artist's most recent production. The choice of medium is consistent with the experimental character of Isgrò's output, in which materials and languages combine to construct meaning, while the format gives the piece a substantial visual presence. The title invites the viewer to consider America not only as a physical place but as a symbolic construction, continually redefined by the stories told about it.

Isgrò's position is confirmed by a long institutional record: participation in several editions of the Venice Biennale, a major retrospective at Palazzo Reale in Milan in 2016, and an important exhibition at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice in 2019. For a collection centred on conceptual art and on the Italian second half of the twentieth century, a recent large-format work by the artist who turned erasure into a signature is a coherent and significant acquisition.