A large repertoire of paintings as well as a conspicuous corpus of drawings, sculptures, sketches and theatrical costumes, tapestries and graphics, will allow you to retrace the most important pictorial cycles that have marked the artistic parable of Corrado Cagli, the great protagonist of the Roman school with Capogrossi and Cavalli, who disappeared 40 years ago in Rome.
The great retrospective exhibition “Corrado Cagli. Folgorazioni e Mutazioni” which is dedicated to him at the Museum of Palazzo Cipolla in via del Corso in Rome starting from 8 November, curated by Bruno Corà, historian and critic, President of the Burri Foundation, in collaboration with the Cagli Archive, is based on 200 works from important institutions and prestigious private collections. The exhibition reconstructs in its entirety the vast creative activity of one of the major protagonists of the Italian and international artistic debate of the 99th century and brings Cagli back to Rome after the XNUMX solo exhibition held in the rooms of the Archivio Arco Farnese gallery curated by Fabio Benzi.
The exhibition itinerary starts from the first early works in majolica to those made in oil or with other techniques of the period of the Roman School (1928 - 1938), from the neo-metaphysical tests (1946 - 1947) elaborated in New York to studies on the fourth dimension (1949) , to then move on to Cellular Motifs (1949), to Direct and Indirect Footprints (1950), to the ethereal Metamorphoses (1957 - 1968), to Orphic Variations (1957), to the evocative and enigmatic series of Cards (1958 - 1963) and finally conclude with the modular Mutations developed until the mid-seventies.
The exhibition highlights some of the iconic moments of Cagli's painting, such as those aimed at giving an identity to Italian "muralism" (parallel to Sironi) in the search for "a cyclical and polyphonic art"; for the occasion, some of the constituent panels of the cycle exhibited and partly censored at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1937 are brought together. There are also some works exhibited in the exhibition of his return to Italy, after his American exile, at the Studio d'Arte Palma in 1947 which aroused a contrasting action by the artists of the Forma group. Finally, on display, in addition to the tapestries, the plastic works, the architectural sketches of the Zodiac Fountain in Terni and those of the Göttingen Monument in Germany, one can also observe the monumental cartoon of the mural painting executed for the XXI Venice Biennale of 1938, Orfeo incanta le belve, and a relevant section focused on the activity of theatrical set and costume designer with emphasis given to the New York experience of the Ballet Society together with George Balanchine.
“Today the art of Cagli demands new reflections – explains the curator Bruno Corà – a new debate on the language and aesthetic thought of this undisputed Master of the XNUMXth Century must be opened. This exhibition moment will allow to investigate and to affirm, with the new critical tools available, the topicality of Cagli's lesson, whose protean action never ceases to amaze and to exercise stimuli to artists calling today to decline the ways of his incessant research and its highest outcomes.”
Corrado Cagli, 1973, Tripudio, tapestry, 330×264 cm 
Prof. Avv. Emmanuele FM Emanuele, President of the Fondazione Terzo Pilastro – Internazionale which promotes the exhibition, adds: “Already in the 30s Cagli was a leading figure in Italian art and represented the country in prestigious international exhibitions: many seen as a privileged exponent of an Italian way to modernity, an alternative to Futurism on the one hand and to the traditional art of the twentieth century on the other. Subsequently, the precarious condition and the nomadic lifestyle of the period of American exile lead him to produce art with what the essayist Raffaele Bedarida has defined as "stylistic schizophrenia", which made the works of that time very "significant on a personal level and not only". Furthermore, a fundamental characteristic of Cagli is certainly the continuous effort towards contamination, seeking collaborations outside the confines of a single discipline: not only with men of letters but also with musicians, architects, mathematicians and much more. In this sense, he is a strongly and incredibly contemporary artist, and it is important, in my opinion, to remember and re-propose his incessant, varied and never banal expressive research today.”
The catalogue, published by Silvana editorial and introduced by a critical essay by the curator Bruno Corà, with a preface by Prof. Avv. Emmanuele FM Emanuele, presents, among other contributions, essays by Aldo Iori, Federica Pirani, Angelo Calabrese, Rita Olivieri , Marco Tonelli, Antonella Renzitti, Claudio Spadoni and Adachiara Zevi, as well as a considerable historical critical apparatus and a selection of the artist's writings by Giuseppe Briguglio from the Cagli Archive in Rome.
The exhibition is organized by Poema SpA with the support of Comediarting.
