For the first time in its 150-year history, the Bargello National Museum hosted a solo contemporary art show, “THE ASCENT OF ORPHEUS: Between and Beyond Representation and Abstraction”, by Adi Da Samraj in two galleries off the Bargello courtyard.
In an unusual bridging of ancient myth and digitally composed large-scale fabrications, the exhibition was Adi Da’s sweeping and at times demanding retelling of the famous Orpheus and Eurydice myth. The exhibit ran from July to October 2015.
Through the nine large-scale pieces and a multimedia projection in the exhibition, Adi Da demonstrated his radical approach to “aperspectival, aniconic, and anegoic” art.
Drawn from his Orpheus One and Linead One suites created in 2007, the digitally composed works, some never shown publicly before, demonstrated the artist’s reach beyond linear perspective and individual “point of view” that have dominated Western art since the Renaissance.
The exhibition was a testament to Adi Da’s advance in what he considered to be the unfinished modernist project of the early 20th-century avant-garde.