Painting Brings You Home
Gregorio Botta
Gregorio Botta (Naples, 1953) is the first Italian artist to exhibit solo at the Rothko Museum in Daugavpils. The city that gave birth to the master of Abstract Expressionism now represents a “home” for a silent, contemplative form of non-figurative painting – an ideal legacy that has long inspired Botta’s artistic research.
Although Botta’s practice unfolds through a plurality of media, often in the form of three-dimensional installations and sculptures, it is grounded in painting understood as an originating artistic gesture, a generative act that continues to inform and preserve the meditative essence of his work.
Using natural materials such as wax, rice paper, water, glass, leaves, and stone, the artist – Neapolitan by birth but Roman by choice – creates rarefied works that evoke emptiness and silence through minimal forms, such as 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. In the “Noli me tangere” (Touch Me Not, John 20:17) series, 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 the years, Gregorio Botta has developed a rigorous and coherent body of work that has been presented in important museums and institutions in Italy and abroad, establishing him as one of the most distinctive voices of contemporary Italian art. His solo exhibitions include projects at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, the MAN Museo d’Arte della Provincia di Nuoro, the Forte di Bard, Palazzo Te in Mantua, Fondazione VOLUME! in Rome, as well as international venues such as museums and cultural institutions in Chile, Peru, and France.
Botta’s international recognition has also been marked by institutional acknowledgements: in 2016 the exhibition “Gregorio Botta. Latidos. Vidrio y vacìo” organised by Il Cigno at the AMS Marlborough Gallery of Santiago del Chile, received the “Premio Lo Mejor de 2016” for Best International Visual Arts Exhibition.
At the Latvian exhibition, around thirty works are presented, some created specifically for this occasion. The exhibition catalogue is published by Il Cigno Arte, with a critical essay by Micol Forti, Director of the Mart Museum in Rovereto.
Curated by Bruno Corà, art historian and critic, president of Burri Foundation, and Farida Zaletilo, Rothko Museum
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
