Under the scientific direction of Gabriella Belli and curated by Antonio Homem, the exhibition Around Pop Art in the Sonnabend Collection retraces, through a nucleus of over forty masterpieces from the Sonnabend Collection – since 2012 in long-term deposit at the Galleria Internazionale d'Arte Moderna di Ca' Pesaro – the extraordinary sixties in America.
It was during this period that a new way of conceiving the work of art was established in the United States, which in the meantime had become the center of world cultural and artistic production, which measured itself against the nascent mass culture and the new media. Desecrating and ironic, but also caustic and critical of that new society, already then a "slave" of the consumer industry intoxicated by that homogenization that during the last decades of the 900th century will be the prologue to the global society of our times, Pop Art will become one of the most influential, well-known and persistent movements in the imagination of the whole '8. Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Jim Dine, Tom Wesselmann, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg and many other authors will be on display with iconic works such as the Campbell's Soup Can series or Warhol's Nine Jackies – who also signed the portrait by Ileana Sonnabend at the opening of the exhibition – the beautiful Little Aloha and the very famous Hot Dog by Lichtenstein or, again, the famous Combine Paintings by Rauschenberg and the legendary Figure XNUMX by Johns. The great masters of the pop current are presented in Mestre together with their European contemporary artists, including Pistoletto, Arman, Christo and Mario Schifano and with authors of a later generation, such as Jeff Koons and Haim Steinbach, who take up Pop Art with an conceptual. It is history that it was Ileana and her first husband Leo who kick-started this extraordinary artistic movement in America, thanks to the early discovery of the work of Rauschenberg and Johns – first in England – whose works were exhibited for the first time right in their gallery in New York, towards the end of the Fifties.
The history of the Sonnabend collection therefore represents one of the most fascinating collecting events of the 1962th century. When, in November 1964, Ileana and her second partner Michael Sonnabend opened their gallery in Paris, the desire that moved them was to present young American artists to the European public. From the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg starts a new generation of authors such as Warhol, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Rosenquist and Wesselmann, all presented in the Parisian gallery. Their success was soon recognized at the Venice Biennale, when in 57 Rauschenberg was awarded the first prize for painting. The exhibition, which is fully part of the cycle of exhibitions that the Fondazione Musei Civici presented on the occasion of the 2017th Art Biennale, is accompanied by a precious catalog published by Linea d'Acqua (Venice, XNUMX), which collects an intervention by Gabriella Belli, an interview by Elisabetta Barisoni with Antonio Homem, of the Sonnabend Collection Foundation and datasheets by Mario Codognato.
The exhibition is open until 5 November 2017
