Roma/New York, 1953–1964 January 12–February 25, 2023 537 West 20th Street, New York

David Zwirner is pleased to present Roma/New York, 1953–1964, an exhibition exploring the significant intellectual and artistic cross-pollination between artists in the centers of Italian and American art in the 1950s and 1960s, on view at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street location.
In the early 1950s, against the backdrop of New York’s emergence as an international art capital and Italy’s postwar economic boom and cultural revival after fascism, Informale and abstract painters working and exhibiting in Rome, such as Afro Basaldella, Alberto Burri, Giuseppe Capogrossi, and Piero Dorazio, began to be regularly featured in solo exhibitions in New York galleries—like Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery, and Catherine Viviano’s and Leo Castelli’s eponymous spaces.
At the same time, several New York–based artists, such as Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg, traveled to Italy, and their work was influenced by their experiences there. Many of these artists, including Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Rauschenberg, Salvatore Scarpitta, and Twombly, showcased at notable venues in Rome, most especially Irene Brin’s and Gaspero del Corso’s Galleria dell’Obelisco and Plinio De Martiis’s Galleria La Tartaruga. Throughout this period, group exhibitions in each city presented both communities of artists alongside one another, putting their work in direct dialogue. Fruitful relationships emerged from this transatlantic exchange, as in the case of Twombly returning to Italy in 1957 at the suggestion of artist Toti Scialoja and de Kooning working from Afro’s studio in Rome in 1959.