Starting from a title that is already a paradox – Painting is back – since painting in Italy has never really waned, more than forty years after those polymorphous and vital eighties, the exhibition - from 2 June to 3 October 2021 - proposes a first investigation into the protagonists of the 80s, who provocatively understood painting as a happy and rapacious ability to paint the world of images with a new vitality and who immediately had international visibility and an almost overwhelming fame. The exhibition is dedicated to the public of the new generations and proceeds by insights, certainly not exhaustive but revealing, of the transversality experienced by the artists in those years.
Commenting on the historic Berlin exhibition Zeitgeist, in December 1982, the “New York Times” known as “the Italians […] turn up everywhere” (“Italians […] are everywhere”), a shrewd comment that bears witness to the international energy shared by Italian artists in those years, as well as their disruptive force with respect to a system that is beginning to define itself as global . This not only for the most recurring names in memory, linked to the fame of Trans-avant-garde launched, almost in the manner of an avant-garde manifesto, by Achille Bonito Oliva from the pages of "Flash Art" (The Italian Trans-avant-garde, 1979), but also for artists who move in continuity with the previous generation, such as Mario Disgusting, present with large canvases, unpublished and singular, with colors almost as desperate as pyrotechnic, or Save with its landscapes made of ruins never so vital and throbbing, and again franc Angeli, remembered here with a Roman night (1985-1988) almost two meters in homage to his city or to the vitality of the anthropological and multi-ethnic flavor echoes of Aldo Mondino.
Decades last very little, culturally they are born and end well in advance of the official dates: this exhibition opens with works between 1977 and 1980, works that are surprising because they are germinal, of Gino De Dominicis, Luigi Ontani e Mimmo Paladino to certify a creative freedom that has its roots in the Italian visual tradition and, without complexes, interprets it also through drawing, the photographic support up to the re-proposition of a monumental video-installation of 1984, IL SWIMMER (goes too often to Heidelberg), of Studio Azzurro. The Eighties no longer understood as an orthodoxy of movements but as the reconstruction of an open dialogue between the protagonists of the time, where authors such as Mario Merz, master of the rediscovery of the great myths of humanity o Carol Rama with a visionary and sensitive painting linked to his own subjectivity.
Fundamental works by Sandro Chia Painter of 1978 and, in the development of the exhibition in a sort of countermelody, paintings by Mimmo Germanà together with Ernesto Tatafiore. Francesco Clemente features historical works such as the Senza titolo from 1980 from the Intesa Sanpaolo collection; while in the course of these years Nicholas DeMaria which deals with mural painting and the great poetic themes alongside the irreverent and playful compositions of Aldo Spoldi or to the articulated path of Enzo Cucchi, which ideally opens the exhibition with The stigmata (1980)
Different personalities, in dialogue since those years side by side in major international exhibitions; from the Biennale from Venice a Documenta of Kassel or in exhibitions that have marked the history of art since the seventies, such as Europa79 in Stuttgart (1979), A NewSpirit in Painting at the Royal Academy of London (1981) e Zeitgbeholdt in Berlin (1982). It should be remembered, at this juncture, how the Eighties witnessed the birth of a new "ssystem of art” which unites the great galleries of New York, Cologne, Zurich with the galleries of Italian cities such as Modena, Naples, Milan or Turin in a particularly vital and active Italian fabric, even in its province.
With counterparts of a transversal nature, of that milieu linked to the great experiments and the "other" Milanese culture, the exhibition also gives an account of the return to Italy of protagonists of those years such as Mimmo Rotella o Valerio Adami or that figure of great intellectual, translator, critic that he was Emilio Tadin.
Ad Henry Baj the exhibition devotes an entire room built on four rare paintings from the Intesa Sanpaolo collection, made between the XNUMXs and XNUMXs, which accompany the visitor in a maturation of the artist's pictorial language and creative mechanism, to then lead him to the spectacular The world of ideas: a 19-metre-long spray-painted canvas, almost a contemporary graffiti executed in 1983 and surprisingly topical today.
Simultaneously with the exhibition, a special issue of the "Flash Art" magazine will be published and distributed, which in a new guise will bring together articles, interviews, documents related to the artists on display and which will return the critical richness of those eighties of which as a magazine it was one of the tools fundamentals of international Italian artistic culture.
