Guided tour to the Rothko exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi, followed by a lecture by Prof. Brad Evans (Professor of Political Violence and Aesthetics, University of Bath) and Chantal Meza (Artistic Fellow, University of Bath). Jointly organised by Istituto Fiorentino di Critica Culturale and EUI Visual and Material History Working Group, in partnership with the University of Bath
How do you represent what is fundamentally unrepresentable?
Mark Rothko insisted that he was the most violent of all American painters. We live surrounded by images of suffering. Seeing has rarely been easier; witnessing has rarely been more difficult. This conversation asks what it means for art to keep that difference open.
Florence makes that question unavoidable. This is a city shaped by the figure, by the body as the place where the sacred, the human, and the political become visible. It was here, in 1950, that Rothko encountered Fra Angelico's frescoes at San Marco, an experience he would never fully leave behind. This summer, five of his paintings hang in the very cells where Angelico painted. The confrontation is direct. Where Angelico reaches for transcendence through the divine figure, Rothko refuses it. What remains is not revelation but aftermath: the void the figure leaves behind when it can no longer bear the weight of what we have witnessed.
In a culture that circulates violence through screens, accelerates attention, and converts suffering into content, these questions acquire renewed urgency. What happens when suffering becomes spectacle? What forms of violence remain unseen not because they are hidden, but because they resist representation? And what might abstraction offer as a response?
The EUI's Visual and Material History Working Group , the Istituto Fiorentino di Critica Culturale, in partnership with the University of Bath, with the support of Palazzo Strozzi and House of Nine, are hosting Prof. Brad Evans, whose work has long explored the relationship between violence, disappearance, and visual culture, and painter, Chantal Meza, an Artistic Fellow at the University of Bath, whose painting engages memory and loss. This conversation asks what Rothko's return to Florence, to the city of the figure, still demands of us. And whether abstraction remains one of the few artistic languages capable of confronting violence without turning it into spectacle.
PROGRAMME
10.00-11.30 - Palazzo Strozzi (address: Piazza degli Strozzi, 50123 Firenze) - meeting and guided visits to the Rothko exhibition (reduced price for the lecture's participants: EUR 6.00)
12.00-13.00 - Palazzo Buontalenti (address: Via Cavour 65, 50129 Firenze), Elinor Ostrom Room - lecture by Prof. Brad Evans and Chantal Meza
For organisational reasons, please register by Tuesday 7 July, 23:59 CEST
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