EDDart Rome presents “N.71”, Delfina Scarpa and Tano Festa, from Wednesday, May 7 to Friday, July 11, 2025 at Palazzo Taverna.
The project unfolds as a dialogue between the works of Tano Festa (Rome, 1938 – Rome, 1988) and pieces created specifically for the exhibition by Delfina Scarpa (Rome, 1993), who is exhibiting in our space for the first time.
At the heart of the exhibition is Scarpa’s most recent body of work, a series of blue pencil drawings. “The slightly distorted perspectives force us to revisit the rooms of habit: interior spaces inhabited by not-quite-recognizable objects, like half-forgotten words, notes from a memory that was never fully written,” the artist explains.
The title “N.71” pays homage to Interno, a pivotal work by Tano Festa created in 1961. It is one of his earliest “objects”—still on canvas and not yet entirely in wood—born from the need to relate internal space to external space. In this spirit, Festa’s Persiane become an ideal counterpoint to Scarpa’s works, elements of a dialogue the young artist initiates with the key figures of the so-called Scuola di Piazza del Popolo.
“You’re not born an artist in Rome by chance. You’re born inside an image, a colored echo, a smudge of paint that doesn’t ask for permission. I was born inside that, and maybe a little outside too—inside that urban and fierce imaginary that Tano Festa and Mario Schifano traced like a crooked, but precise dream. The kind that sticks to your skin. This city gave them to me as putative fathers—ironic, visionary, desperately alive. And I accepted the inheritance not as a burden, but the way one accepts a vice: with joy, and with a hint of inevitability,” says Scarpa.