Desire Script

Amanita and Fondazione Iris are pleased to present Desire Script, a solo exhibition by WangShui (b. 1986), opening October 24th by appointment in Bassano in Teverina.

Desire Script brings WangShui’s practice of mark-making into dialogue with histories of erasure and the contemporary language of code. Working primarily on aluminum, the artist displaces metal through hand etching to create “empty marks” — shallow abrasions and gashes that refract light through subtraction rather than addition. These incisions echo lineages from Cy Twombly’s erasures to ancient calligraphic traditions, where meaning emerges as much from absence as from inscription.

In WangShui’s work, the sequencing of marks resists resolution; it is often unclear which gestures came first, or even which plane of the surface they occupy, as if instructions were embedded like living code, weaving infinite loops into the surface. This ambiguity unsettles linear perspective, evoking the recursive logics of programming as much as the palimpsest of memory. The mark becomes a kind of script: at once a gesture of longing and a program written in negative space. The title evokes both the protocols of desire and the haptics of technology, suggesting that history, memory, and consciousness converge in a field of light, where emptiness itself becomes radiant. Working across film, installation, painting, and sculpture, WangShui has developed a polymorphous practice that traverses trauma, architecture, and media to explore states of metamorphosis and liminality. Their work, often situated between figuration and abstraction, resists fixed narratives in favor of unstable, polyvocal structures. Recent presentations include La Biennale di Venezia (2024), Haus der Kunst, Munich (2023), the Whitney Biennial (2022), and the Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin (2019).

Fondazione Iris is housed in the 17th-century Palazzo Altemps in Bassano in Teverina, a hill town in northern Lazio, about an hour from Rome. Acquired by Cy Twombly in 1975, the palazzo served as both his summer studio and a retreat from Rome, where he created some of his most important works. Following a two-year restoration led by the Twombly family, the building reopened in 2023 as Fondazione Iris—dedicated to preserving Twombly’s legacy while fostering new artistic and scholarly engagement. Today the foundation functions as an exhibition and performance space as well as a study center housing Twombly’s personal library.

Past Exhibitions

The program began in 2023 with Robert Nava, who spent time in residence at Iris producing a body of new paintings that tapped into mythological and primal themes, bringing his distinctive raw energy into dialogue with the palazzo’s historic spaces. In 2024, Rita Ackermann presented Manna Rain, a solo exhibition combining paintings, works on paper, and a site-specific mural. The atmospheric, biblical, and cinematic sensibilities of this body of work reveal a deep engagement with the atavic landscape of Tuscia and a profound dialogue with the legacy of Cy Twombly.
With WangShui, Fondazione Iris continues its commitment to presenting internationally recognized artists in dialogue with the history of the palazzo.