Everything has to be called into question. The artist is free for his free exploration, as is the scientist who does not ask anyone's permission for a discovery. There are not only scientific discoveries, there are poetic discoveries.
With these words Emilio Vedova, in a short text from 1954, condensed the spirit of the time and the artistic ferments that were shaking him. Calling everything into question meant something profoundly different from what the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century had intended. In the years immediately following the end of the Second World War no one could allow - to himself or to others - any type of purely aesthetic revolution, a renewal that did not call into question the very meaning of making art, the social function of the artist.
Freedom of expression, therefore, the rejection of norms - both those dictated by tradition and those now reduced to formalism established by the historical avant-gardes - the strong existential component were the main common elements that led the artists to experiment with techniques, materials and methods very different expressions. The results of this incessant experimentation are perfectly legible even in the works on paper, often perfectly completed and independent results, rather than sketches and notes of a design nature.
The main linguistic orientations of the Italian Informal and of contemporary research are well represented within the collection of the Civic Gallery of Modena, whose sheets testify to the prevalence, from time to time, of the sign, of the gesture, of the form, of the material, of spatial articulation. Added to the drawings are the engravings from the collection of Don Casimiro Bettelli, which the Civic Gallery received on loan from the Modenese Curia in 1999, often extraordinary examples of inventive capacity and surprising technical experimentation, as in the cases represented by the graphics by Alberto Burri and by Lucio Fontana.
These artistic testimonies will be clearly visible within the exhibition SEGNO FORMA GESTO set up at the Municipal Art Gallery of Città di Castello and curated by the director of the Civic Gallery of Modena Marco Pierini, with the technical and operational support of Atlante Servizi Culturali, in collaboration with the Burri Foundation and the support of the Municipality of Città di Castello and the Palazzo Vitelli Association in S. Egidio. The exhibition will offer more than seventy works in a process designed to explain to the public the particular artistic and cultural renewal, which for the first time in the history of art has spread to different countries and continents developing similar solutions and of which the Italian artists active around the 50s and 60s were not secondary protagonists.
Indeed, in Italy artists such as Afro, Burri, Capogrossi and Fontana, to name but a few, were able to gather the avant-gardes and autonomously reformulate surprisingly new formal solutions.
In addition to the aforementioned works from the Modena Gallery, the exhibition will have the honor of hosting a folder of six Combustions and two rare Drawings by Alberto Burri. The Tifernate Foundation, in fact, wanted to honor with the loan of some of the Master's works, this event conceived as a thematic starting point for the celebrations of the centenary of his birth, scheduled for next year. For the first time in Città di Castello, a center for contemporary arts that operates nationally and internationally is cooperating with established realities and new emerging associations in the area, for an artistic project with a high educational and cultural value.
Carla Accardi, Afro, Vasco Bendini, Annibale Biglione, Alberto Burri, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Mino Ceretti, Piero Dorazio, Lucio Fontana, Pinot Gallizio, Bice Lazzari, Leoncillo, Mario Nanni, Gastone Novelli, Cesare Peverelli, Concetto Pozzati, Bepi Romagnoni, Antonio Sanfilippo, Emilio Scanavino, Tancredi, Claudio Verna, Giuseppe Zigaina are the protagonists of this articulated and multifaceted intellectual adventure, whose traces still remain alive and clear in the fragile papers displayed in the exhibition, with their signs of use, the folds, the small spots that tell the story, their passage – still ongoing – over time.
Inaugural event
FORMS IN ACTION – Jazz concert
The inaugural event, promoted by Cepu Arte and scheduled for August 23 at 18.00, will take place in the garden of the Municipal Art Gallery of Città di Castello. Ideal setting to host the musical project FORMS IN ACTION – Jazz concert curated by Lorenzo Fiorucci for the Novamusica music school.
A project that was born for the occasion and that tends to focus its attention on the concept of temporality - instantaneous, in Latin the Sic et Nunc, translatable with the "here and now", which a large part of art criticism has used to describe and explain the art of non-forms in Italy and beyond (Informelo Aformale as it was still written at the end of the fifties). A period that can be placed from the end of the forties to the end of the fifties, a range of just over a decade in which the language of the arts has profoundly changed, the very concept of art and work, is taking on a new meaning. No longer a stylistic, compositional or structural bond of the work, but the work becomes the result of a creative event resulting from an existential situation of the artist. The creative moment therefore assumes importance. In the same years also in music there is the same revolution in which to blow up the consolidated schemes and structures of an art at the service of the bourgeois class, a new genre is put before it within the Jazz root, the Bebop, whose rapidity execution and above all the rich improvisation of the moment determines a long creative outburst that made the ancient musical patterns defunctionalized.
In the wake of this experience we want to pay homage to the period by projecting those researches onto a contemporary context involving young composers and musicians of international renown such as the drummer John Arnold, the pianist Manuel Magrini and the double bass player Matteo Chimenti, who alternating original pieces with jazz standards will demonstrate the magic of improvisation by evoking the origins of what was one of the great moments of art and music.
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