Abstract
With a dose of naiveté we may claim that the most significant shift within the artworld of past years (or at least its theoretical basis) has been the dissipation of (post)conceptual art and the rise of diverse strands of materialisms in the opposite vector. However, material interests in art practice are far from new and it is necessary to point out instances of these tendencies in history, for example marble frescoes under Madonna delle Ombre in San Marco monastery and the rider in the clouds in Andrea Mantegna's painting of Saint Sebastian.
This can be paralleled with shifts in philosophy from the dominance of poststructuralism to flirtations with various speculative and realist approaches. While after Kant, philosophy focused on critique and (social) construction of reality, what we face now is the resurgence of realist and materialist thought.
The idea of transcending from the material to the immaterial was commonly used in religious paintings. For example, through pictorial rupture in the sky we can get access to metaphysical world, the sphere of God.
What becomes more than clear by now is that material tendencies have been active in the entire tradition of history of art and thinking. Our exhibition aims at tracing a concise yet full-fledged genealogy of material-oriented art.