Emilio Isgrò — Studio per Marmara (2010)

Emilio Isgrò (b. 1937, Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto) is one of the defining figures of Italian conceptual art and the artist who, from 1964, made erasure — cancellatura — into a language. Applied to books, encyclopaedias, musical scores and maps, his black bars do not destroy meaning: they select it, leaving a residue of words and signs from which a new reading emerges.

Studio per Marmara (2010) belongs to the cycle built on the cartography of the Sea of Marmara, and carries that cycle's defining gesture: a printed map of the region around Istanbul crossed by the systematic black bars that suppress its toponyms and geographical indications, while coordinates, road numbering and the Turkish inscription Marmara Denizi remain legible as the material pre-text of the intervention. Its status as a studio places it in the preparatory phase of the cycle; studies are nonetheless autonomous works within Isgrò's corpus, regularly exhibited and traded alongside the larger versions.

The artist's institutional standing is documented and stable: works in the permanent collections of MoMA, Centre Pompidou, MAXXI, MART, GAM Torino, Museo del Novecento and Gallerie d'Italia, four participations in the Venice Biennale (1972, 1978, 1986, 1993) and major retrospectives including the 2025 exhibition at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan. Within his production, erasures applied to maps are among the most sought after — the support itself carries meaning, and the act of cancelling a geography produces the most legible statement of his poetics.