To mark AMACI’s 22nd Contemporary Art Day, Sandro Bongiani Arte Contemporanea is presenting a preview of the Memorial Ruggero Maggi, titled “Come un battito d’ali” (Like the Beating of Wings); curated by Sandro Bongiani, the exhibition features 138 works by 70 contemporary artists across six gallery rooms.
Ruggero Maggi born in Turin, Milanese by adoption, and a true citizen of the world lived his life fully as both an artist and a free spirit; he was a non conformist outsider, so much so that he remains difficult to categorize to this day. He began his artistic career in the early 1970s with early works characterized by a certain surrealism and the increasingly persistent inclusion of real world elements that the visual composition deliberately refuses to fully absorb. Over the years, this introduction of “deviant” elements into his work became increasingly pronounced, creating a relationship of intense “osmosis” with elements of the past (wood, stone, fossils) that coexist energetically with technological components (neon tubes, Plexiglas, lasers) a sort of conceptual and emotional “synchronism.” His language, as Pierre Restany noted, “combines high tech elements with primary, elemental materials; primitivism with sophistication.” A writer, a researcher in the field of visual poetry, a driving force behind the Mail Art movement, and a theorist of “chaotic art,” Ruggero Maggi has works on permanent display at the Museum of Chinese History in Beijing, the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, and the Museum of Holography in Paris, as well as in numerous other major museums and collections worldwide. Among the various projects undertaken, we must proudly recall the design and accompanying exhibition for Ruggero Maggi’s 70th birthday titled “Fragilità e distacco” (Fragility and Detachment) held in 2020. For this event, the artist suggested using a card printed with a butterfly an image that proved to be a premonition of his sudden passing five years later in Bologna on October 29, 2025. This prompted the urgent need to immediately launch a new international project: a memorial marking the first anniversary of his death. Titled “Come un battito d’ali” (Like the Beat of a Wing), the project involves sending artists two work cards featuring a butterfly no longer brown, but blue. It is a butterfly reminiscent of the Xerces (*Glaucopsyche xerces*), which went extinct nearly a century ago, symbolizing the passage of time and the nature of things that fade and end; it serves as a call to actively reflect on fragility, loss, and detachment the fundamental and ultimate conditions of our precarious existence.
