Serena Schioppa (Teramo, 1996) is an art historian and independent curator based in Rome. She joined the Mahler & LeWitt Studios Spring Session to research and develop an exhibition project celebrating Afranio Metelli’s (1924–2011) centenary. The exhibition will be hosted by the Palazzo Collicola in Spoleto, where in 2008 Giovanni Carandente organised the artist’s career retrospective. It will be curated by the current director Saverio Verini and Schioppa, opening November 2024. Born in Pissignano, near Spoleto, Metelli was a leading figure in the art scene of Umbria where he lived and worked for most of his life. He spent influential periods of time working abroad in France (with a community of artists under Picasso at Vallauris, an experience which was deeply impactful) as well as in Mexico and the United States. Metelli’s fascination with and reinterpretation of the art of the past, as well as his ability to absorb current trends and make them his own, sat alongside his love of craft and popular culture, from his deep understanding of ceramic traditions to his love of boxing. He was endlessly inquisitive about the power of art to express the diversity of life’s experience. The result was a dynamic body of work which explored figuration (for example his extensive series of self-portraits) and abstraction, at times combining these modes, using a range of techniques, including drawing and collage, painting and sculpture. The centenary exhibition will take Metelli’s open-minded approach as a provocation to more homogenous ways of working today: seeing in his diverse investigations an urgency to understand art as an ongoing conversation, capable of responding to current feelings and ideas – unfolding arguments, occasionally finding accords – and so being constantly new and relevant.

Presenting findings from her archival research at her Open Studio event, Schioppa said: “From the records emerges the figure of an elusive, hidden, discreet painter. One title reads ‘Afranio Metelli: anarchic nomad.’ My research — still ongoing — aims to delve between the lines of this dense biography filled with encounters, travels, and experiments. It’s a journey through the multitude of memories and traces that allow us to closely observe Metelli’s story: documents, letters, works on canvas, on wood panels, on old doors, random supports, and still watercolors, terracotta, ceramics, collages, décollages, and much more. Even his studio in Pissignano can be read as a work of art, perhaps unaware: a final mysterious self-portrait.”