28 June 2010 | Santa Maria della Scala Museum, Siena
28 june – 18 july 2010
Exhibition of sketches of the Palio of July 2010 by Ali Hassoun at the Santa Maria della Scala Museum in Siena.
At the same time, a personal exhibition in the gallery.
Hassoun, an Italian by adoption, was born in Lebanon in Sidon in 1964, in 1982 he settled in Siena and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, and in 1992, again in Florence, he graduated in architecture. Now he lives and works in Milan.
In his works he admirably combines two cultures, that of his native Lebanon, and that absorbed in Italy. Art thus becomes a borderland in which two cultures meet, the traditional and spiritual one of Islamic mysticism, and the dynamic and evolutionary one of the West.
Thus the artist becomes an interpreter of different but comparable cultures, which coexist in the perfectly orchestrated space of his colorful canvases. The characters of an Islam or of an Africa that is as experienced as it is fabulous and imagined, in his compositions are all captured in a game of cultured quotations and indirect references between figure and background.
Drappellone’s painting, until about forty years ago reserved exclusively for Sienese painters, then began to be entrusted also to well-known Italian and foreign painters. The names who have already achieved this feat are very important, it will be enough to remember Mino Maccari, Renato Guttuso, Renzo Vespignani, Bruno Caruso, Valerio Adami and Luigi Ontani among the Italians and Eduardo Arroyo, Jim Dine, Folon and Botero among the foreigners.
The Drappellone or palio is the prize awarded to the Contrada that wins the Career and consists of a raw silk banner 2.50 meters high and 0.80 meters wide, then enriched, as mentioned, by the painting of an artist.