ROME—ArtInfo’s correspondent in Italy takes us on a tour of exhibitions on view in Rome, including a major museum exhibition for Marc Chagall that confirms his genius, and Bruno & Botto’s urban wasteland installation at the Cinecittadue nonprofit space. In the galleries, there are highly personal sculptures by Turner-winner Rachel Whiteread and innovative new paintings by the 84-year-old Carla Accardi.

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MUSEUM EXHIBITION

Il Complesso del Vittoriano
“Chagall of Miracles”
Through July 1, 2007

Comprising 180 works painted over 60 years, this show at Il Complesso del Vittoriano bears out Clement Greenberg’s judgment that Marc Chagall (1887-1985) was among the “very great artists of his time.”

As well as a wealth of masterpieces—such as the Red Jew (1915) and Above the City (1914-1918)—the exhibition incorporates artwork that further illuminates the artist’s skill.

One gallery, for instance, is devoted entirely to “Lubok,” the anonymous 18th- and 19th-century Russian lithographs populated by folkloric, flying characters and anthropomorphic animals. Their juxtaposition with the Russian-born master’s work demonstrates their influence on his imagination.

Meanwhile, Composition with Circles and Goat (1920), an oil of a stiff-legged soldier and goat overlaid with spartan abstract shapes, testifies to Chagall’s vain attempt to emulate Suprematism, which dominated Russian art circles at the time.

But of all the work on display, it is the spiritually charged canvases that make the most impact—particularly The Fall of the Angel (1923-1947). Dominated by a devil-red angel plunging to Earth, flanked by a Crucifixion and a fleeing Rabbi, the painting’s apocalyptic vision is tempered with images of hope: a burning candle, a sun, a cow kissing a violin.

As a Jew inspired by Christian iconography, Chagall was one of the 20th century’s artistic enigmas. He was a dreamer engaged with the realities of war and persecution, and an avant-garde artist who refused any single movement. What a pleasure to find a show that does him justice.

NONPROFIT EXHIBITIONS

Cinecittadue Arte Contemporanea
“Bruno & Botto—Waiting for the Early Bus”
Through to April 29, 2007

Gianfranco Botto and Roberta Bruno, who exhibited at the 2005 Venice Biennale, have transformed the interior of Cinecittadue Arte Contemporanea into an urban wasteland. And what better place for such a project than this not-for-profit space, located on top of a shopping precinct in Rome’s eastern periphery?

In the gallery, a derelict bus stop stands on a puddle of cracked asphalt. A photomontage of anonymous garages, warehouses and an abandoned Art Deco cinema runs around the walls. And pinned to these scenes and heaped on the floor are pages torn from rock fanzines.

The kernel in it all is the video Waiting for the Early Bus. Presented to the soundtrack of “Falling Flowers” (an indie-style ballad performed by Botto & Bruno’s own band), the black-and-white film shows a Filipino woman and her daughter waiting at a bus stop. When they finally see the bus, the pair burst out laughing.

Lyrical yet unromantic, the video is rich with images: the symmetry of their naked feet in flip-flops; the slice of pole that is the bus-stop; the little girl’s delight as she waves a toy at her mother.

Curator Ludovico Pratesi aptly describes the installation as a “happy and disturbing synthesis between de Chirico and Pasolini.”

But it is also a vision of a world that bears witness to the artists’ own life on the industrial outskirts of Turin, a life that is—in the words of American poet Adrienne Rich—“poor, quick, unmonumented.”

COMMERCIAL GALLERY EXHIBITIONS

Lorcan O’Neill Gallery
“Rachel Whiteread: New Sculptures and Drawings”
Through March 31, 2007

Winner of the 1993 Turner Prize, leading British sculptor Rachel Whiteread keeps a low profile. “I am ambitious for the work, not for myself,” she remarked recently.

Similarly, her pale, almost featureless casts of interior spaces can seem distantly impersonal. Yet many of her works, such as Shallow Breath (1988), a cast of the underside of the bed where she was born, are meditations on her own history.