MATERIALS: Wooden coat hanger, man’s suit with shoes and accessories
DIMENSIONS: 108.5 × 74 × 60 cm
PROVENANCE: The artist
COLLECTION: Fabio Mauri Estate, Rome
CATALOGUE: O_1995_593
Mauri hung one of his outfits – jacket, tie, trousers, braces, belt and dress shoes – on a wooden valet stand, accompanied by various accessories visible in one of two drawers left open, such as a watch, cufflinks, a handkerchief, a shoehorn and coins of different origins. Every detail was chosen with care and refinement to represent a bourgeois social status, shorn of the body’s individuality. In line with the neck, Mauri fire-etched the title Servo muto ariano on the piece of furniture, ideologically connoting the work and including it among the ‘Aryan objects’ exhibited in the show at the Galleria Sauro Bocchi, Rome (inv. 1023).
Mauri wrote: ‘The respectable garments on the “valet stand”, the suitcases, or the out-of-use hatboxes nevertheless bear witness to a tradition belonging to a community that consumes its prejudices, making them objects without kinship to one another. Variety simulates totality; each object aspires to evoke the ambiguous design of an ideology.’1 Mauri used Servo muto ariano to illustrate one of Mauri’s texts on Girogio de Chirico whose mannequins is resembles, exhibiting it in a number of exhibitions dedicated to the master of Metaphysics.2
1. F. Mauri, ‘De Chirico spiato’, in Giorgio De Chirico: Nulla sine tragoedia gloria. Atti del Convegno Europeo di Studi, edited by C. Crescentini, m&m – maschietto e musolino, Florence, 2002, p. 305.
2. See, for example, Giorgio de Chirico, Complesso monumentale di san Giovanni, Catanzaro, 25 March – 30 June 2006, edited by C. Crescentini, T. Sicoli (catalogue).
1995, Rome, Galleria Sauro Bocchi, Arierwiege, 31 May – 30 June.
1995, Rome, Ripa Residence, RipArte ’95, 21–24 September.
2006, Catanzaro, Complesso Monumentale del San Giovanni, Giorgio de Chirico, 25 March – 30 June, curated by Claudio Crescentini, Tonino Sicoli.
2008, Rome, Cappella Orsini, La promessa della casa in ordine, 27 January – 14 March.
2010-2011, Trieste, Castello di Miramare, Fabio Mauri: Un sognatore della ragione, 3 December 2010 – 27 February 2011, curated by Roberto Alberton.
2016-2017, Bergamo, GAMeC, Fabio Mauri: Arte per legittima difesa, 7 October 2016 – 15 January 2017, curated by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio.
2018-2019, Treviso, Museo di Santa Caterina, Museo Casa Robegan, Ca’ dei Ricchi, Re-use, 27 October 2018 – 10 February 2019, curated by Valerio Dehò.
2019, Turin, GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Giorgio de Chirico. Ritorno al futuro, 18 April – 25 August, curated by Lorenzo Canova, Riccardo Passoni.
2021, Venice, Galleria Michela Rizzo, Money Money Money: Denaro, valore, speculazione, 3 February – 13 March, curated by Elena Forin.
2021, Rome, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Ciao Maschio! Volto, potere e identità dell’uomo contemporaneo, 23 June – 14 November, curated by Arianna Angelelli, Claudio Crescentini.
Giorgio De Chirico: Nulla sine tragoedia gloria. Atti del Convegno Europeo di Studi, edited by Claudio Crescentini (Florence: m&m - maschietto e musolino, 2002), p. 306 (ill.).
Giorgio De Chirico: L’enigma e la gloria, exhibition catalogue, Complesso Monumentale del San Giovanni, Catanzaro, edited by Claudio Crescentini, Tonino Sicoli (Catanzaro: Edizioni AR&S, 2006), p. 136 (ill.).
Fabio Mauri, Io sono un ariano (Milan: Lampi di stampa, 2009), pp. 332, 335 (ill.).
Fabio Mauri. Un sognatore della ragione, exhibition catalogue, Castello di Miramare, Trieste, edited by Federica Alberton (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale, 2010), p. 47 (ill.).
Elena Volpato, “Fabio Mauri: starting from the end”, in Mousse, no. 29, Milan, Summer 2011, p. 138 (ill.).
Fabio Mauri. Arte per legittima difesa, exhibition catalogue, GAMeC, Bergamo, edited by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio (Bergamo: GAMeC Books, 2016), p. 86 (ill.).
Re-use. Scarti, oggetti, ecologia nell’arte contemporanea, exhibition catalogue, Museo di Santa Caterina, Museo Casa Robegan, Ca’ dei Ricchi, Treviso, edited by Valerio Dehò (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale, 2018), p. 94 (ill.).
Giorgio de Chirico: Ritorno al futuro: Neometafisica e Arte Contemporanea, exhibition catalogue, GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin, edited by Lorenzo Canova, Riccardo Passoni (Rome: Gangemi editore, 2019), pp. 30, 156, 170 (ill.).
Ciao Maschio! Volto, potere e identità dell’uomo contemporaneo, exhibition catalogue, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Rome, edited by Arianna Angelelli, Claudio Crescentini (Rome: Gangemi editore, 2021), p. 160 (ill.), p. 254.
