In an era when art increasingly becomes either a strategy for visibility or an object of investment, Founded Beauty restores to the artistic gesture its original urgency — a spontaneous act, a chance discovery, an inner necessity.

Manfred Kronenthaler does not call himself an artist. Trained and employed as a biologist, he has devoted his life to studying the natural order of things — only to, almost by accident, begin disrupting that order. His first encounter with Stone Oven House was as simple as it gets: looking for shelter from the rain, he found refuge in our gallery, Aira, a crumbling stone hut by the road. A year later, he returned — this time as a resident artist, ready to work.
Over the course of two weeks in Rorà, Manfred worked with what he found: scraps of metal, weathered beams, discarded tools, objects stripped of their original function. In this alpine context, far from the noise of the market, he allowed matter to behave.

Founded Beauty is not an ironic title. It is literal. In English, founded can mean not only “discovered” (found) but also “established” or “grounded.” Both meanings apply here. Beauty that is unearthed, lifted, placed. Beauty extracted from matter. Beauty that breathes life into inanimate objects, filling them with both narrative and spiritual meaning. A random stone with a piece of wood and some cut pipes attached becomes a lamb. And suddenly it seems to be breathing, and soft to the touch — and you want to tame it, to save it from the sacrificial altar.
The exhibition also features works brought from Germany, forming a retrospective selection of fourteen years of creative output — a practice to which Manfred turned in search of personal salvation. To bring these pieces to Italy, he purchased and refurbished a trailer specifically for this purpose — a gesture that reveals just how central art has become to his life. These earlier sculptures now enter into dialogue with the works made on site, forming a single, living, textured, poetic body — one that charts a movement from visual complexity to essential simplicity, from surface toward depth.

Like a true artist — one devoted equally to seeking and expressing — Manfred is building his own temple and invites us to enter it, to share in the joy of founded beauty.

Curated by Sergei Balovin
Stone Oven House, Rorà, 2025