Day for Night: New American Realism

Featuring work by Shara Hughes, Tschabalala Self and Christina Quarles, the Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, in collaboration with Beirut’s Aïshti Foundation, present the exhibition Day for Night: New American Realism, curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Flaminia Gennari Santori.

The exhibition features more than 150 works by American artists from the Tony and Elham Salamé collection, presented in collaboration with their Aïshti Foundation. One of today’s most dynamic contemporary art institutions, the Foundation was established twenty-five years ago by the Italian-Lebanese entrepreneur Tony Salamé and his wife Elham.

The exhibition takes its title from a work featured in the Salamé collection by New York artist Lorna Simpson. Day for Night—in Italian, “Effetto notte”—is a cinematic effect that allows night scenes to be filmed in daylight. The title was also made famous by a 1973 film by François Truffaut, and in French, the day-for-night effect is called “La Nuit Américaine,” or “the American night.” This image is well-suited to the chiaroscuro visions of the artists included in Day for Night, who, in recent decades, have captured the reality of the United States in all its blinding complexity.