Monuments Counter Monuments: Embrice Gallery Rome.

Embrice Gallery, Opening 15 March, 2025.

Peter Lang, an American architect transplanted in Rome, presents at the Embrice gallery, a series of works created as part of his personal research on monuments.
His work is represented on different types of materials and supports, from paper to drawing on mugs or the use of different types of printing.
A wealth of symbols and signs to narrate the end of the monument, understood as an element of collective memory, and the birth of new monuments linked to the everyday life of a world that is increasingly closed in on itself.
The monument does not disappear, the memory cannot be erased, but is transformed into an anti-monument.
In Peter Lang’s drawings, the anti-monument often still retains the memory of what formally characterised it. The structure remains, the pedestal remains and above all the place, but it no longer represents the memory of an event or a great man, but that which passes through the web every day. That virtual world where self-monuments are built.
The anti-monument is everywhere in various forms, it has neither past nor future, it is all present. In the present. The anti-monument is a domestic object like the monument to the dummy’.
A desecrating operation reminiscent of Venturi’s ‘learning from las vegas’ duck or Cattelan’s finger.
he monument is a monument to consumption, emptied of meaning. The monument is an everyday object in fact the exhibition is presented in a podcast. It is very close to a pop art operation where everyday objects become art.
Lang is American and lives in Rome and it is not by chance that he works on the monument, it is a Venturi-like operation the idea of elevating Las Vegas to an object of study within the framework of contemporary architecture.
‘The exhibition gives back the idea of telling the story as a process, as an archive of signs and symbols, unfolding in space according to a sequence, working on the memory of what we already know and the discovery of new meanings.’ Paola Nicolin, “Las Vegas Backstage,” Abitare 2009.
Carmelo Baglivo

PtL with Daniele Mancini

Linoleum prints of monuments.