Painting Brings Home
Gregorio Botta
Gregorio Botta (Naples, 1953) is the first Italian artist to exhibit solo at the Rothko Museum in Daugavpils, in the place that gave birth to the master of Abstract Expressionism and that symbolically represents the “home” of a high, silent, and contemplative form of non-figurative painting – an ideal legacy that has long inspired Botta’s artistic research.
Although his works are often three-dimensional installations and sculptures, Botta’s art undoubtedly originates in painting and preserves its meditative essence. Wax, rice paper, water, glass, leaves, stones, blood… The Neapolitan artist – who lives and works in Rome – employs many natural materials to construct an intense and contemplative world. In the “Noli me tangere” (Touch Me Not) series, for example, he uses bougainvillea leaves and drops of blood to compose an ideal garden that welcomes pain and transcends it. This is also the case in “Ophelia”, a large horizontal wax panel from whose wounds four streams of water flow – like tears, but also like springs.
Over time, his art has become increasingly rarefied, with works that evoke emptiness and silence through a minimal vocabulary: a thin horizontal glass sheet, a bowl, and two or three pigmented wax tablets in “Horizon”; or sheets of watercoloured and waxed rice paper, which the artist defines as “solid veils”, capable of concealing and at the same time revealing the underlying material.
Botta presents around thirty works in Latvia, some of which were created specifically for this exhibition.
In the course of his long and distinguished career, the artist has exhibited in numerous Italian and European galleries, as well as in museums in Italy and abroad. His most recent solo exhibitions include a 2025 show at MAN in Nuoro and an exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome. He is also the author of “Pollock and Rothko, Gesture and Breath” (Einaudi) and “Paul Klee, Genius and Measure” (Laterza). In March 2026, a new essay devoted to Rothko in Florence will be published by Electa.
Curated by Bruno Corà and Farida Zaletilo
Organised by Rothko Museum and Il Cigno Arte with valued support from the Italian Embassy in Latvia
20 February – 24 May 2026
Publicity image: Gregorio Botta “Horizon”. Glass and wax, 20 x 200 x 8 cm, 2024
