Emilio Isgrò Celebrated at Accademia di Belle Arti di Lecce with Exhibition and Honorary Degree

The Accademia di Belle Arti di Lecce is honoring Emilio Isgrò, the Italian artist known for his 'cancellature' (erasures) initiated in the 1960s, through two initiatives led by director Andrea Rollo and president Fernando De Filippi. A small but precious exhibition titled 'Piccola ma preziosa mostra in Accademia,' curated by Angelo Maria Monaco and installed with architect Ester Annunziata, presents seven works from a private collection in Lecce. The show highlights Isgrò's reflections on the sacred and his erasures of geographical maps, which he describes as creating 'Terra vergine e purificata' by eliminating borders. The exhibition is part of a broader renewal for the academy, which also includes a second group show 'Incipit' conceived by De Filippi. Additionally, the academy presented Isgrò's book 'Autocurriculum' (Sellerio) in a talk with critic Carmelo Cipriani, organized with FAI, during which Isgrò received an honorary degree. Isgrò began his erasures in 1964 after working as a journalist for Il Gazzettino di Venezia, and his practice aims to destroy superfluous words to reconstruct human discourse, as he stated in a recent interview. The exhibition runs at the academy's ground floor gallery.