The exhibition traces an important period in the work of the great Lombard sculptor, concerning the relationship between art and architecture, in relation to the modern metropolis, through 16 sculptures, 15 drawings and 14 photomontages.
The exhibition, entitled Francesco Somaini. A sculptor for the city. New York 1967-1976, curated by Enrico Crispolti and Luisa Somaini, organized by the Francesco Somaini Archive in collaboration with the Milan Triennale, analyzes through 16 sculptures, 15 drawings and 14 photomontages, coming almost entirely from the collections of the Somaini Archive and from Italian private collections, the theme of the relationship between art and architecture in relation to the modern metropolis, in which Somaini is a pioneer in Italy and Europe, both from a theoretical and a design point of view. It is a research, conducted in a logic of overcoming the previous positions of "integration of the arts", which the artist develops starting from the sixties, following the impact with New York culture and architecture.
In fact, Somaini's reflection on the city finds inspiration in the skyline of New York, a metropolis assumed as a symbol of modernity, lived, studied and photographed during a series of business trips made to the United States.
His relationship with New York began in 1960 with a one-man show held at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York. During his stays, he has the opportunity to meet important critics and famous collectors, including the architect Philip Johnson and the Rockefeller family, Lydia Winston Malbin, Alan and Janet Wurzburger, Joseph Hirshhorn, Seimour H. Knox II and many others.
This extraordinary creative decade in Francesco Somaini's career continued in 1970 with the inauguration of large-scale sculptures, designed and implemented for the cities of Baltimore, Atlanta and Rochester.
Somaini entrusts his ideas to a collection of design drawings, published in the volume Urgency in the city, edited by the sculptor himself and by Enrico Crispolti (Mazzotta, 1972), and then proceeds to develop them on a plastic level by executing the series of great imaginative force of the Carnifications of an architecture of the mid-seventies, such as the Sphinx of Manhattan of 1974 and the Colossus of New York of 1976. Sculptures to be understood also as models of enigmatic buildings, the result of an original formal conception that has its roots in antiquity .
As Giulio Carlo Argan writes, “Somaini conscientiously studied the problem, which involved his responsibility as an artist; and came to the conclusion that the historical and social institution of the city is not out of date. The city retains a historical dimension; the intervention and commitment of the artists in the search for a solution are not only possible, but necessary and urgent (…). Somaini's assumption is methodological and planning: the artist's task, today, is not to build or reconstruct the city, but to interpret it, make it significant”.
His are Archisculptures which subsequently became the protagonists of some high-impact photomontages, carried out with the aim of documenting their utopian setting to "draw - recalls Bruno Zevi - a more incisive and strident provocative impact".
The exhibition is accompanied by an important catalog published by Skira, with texts by Francesco Somaini, Enrico Crispolti, Fulvio Irace, Giulio Carlo Argan and contributions by Beatrice Borromeo, Fabio G. Porta Trezzi and Luisa Somaini.
Francesco Somaini was born in Lomazzo (Como) on August 6, 1926. He attended Manzù's courses at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and made his debut in 1948 at the National Review of Figurative Arts, promoted by the Rome Quadrennial. He graduated in law from the University of Pavia in 1949. He took part in the Venice Biennale for the first time in 1950. After a phase of reflection on the experiences of international modern sculpture, he turned to abstract art and achieved autonomy of language towards the middle of the fifties with works made in ferric conglomerate (Open song, Forza del nascere), which mark his adhesion to the Movimento Arte Concreta and prelude to the great informal season.
He came to the attention of critics in 1956 with his participation in the XXVIII Venice Biennale. He achieves worldwide success with the room at the V Biennial of São Paulo in Brazil in 1959, where he is awarded the 1st international prize for sculpture, recognition that opens the market to the United States. In 1960 he was invited with a personal room to the XXX Venice Biennale. The following year he took part in the Deuxième Biennale de Paris where he received the 1st prize of the French Art Criticism. In these years his work meets the favor of critics such as Argan and Tapié. Interested in experimenting with materials, the artist also melts his works in iron, lead and pewter, which he then attacks with a blowtorch and polishes the concave parts, to accentuate its expressiveness. It's the time of the Martyrs and the Wounded, presented in the various solo shows set up at the Galleria Notizie in Turin, at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York, at the Galleria Odyssia in Rome and New York, at the Galleria Blu in Milan and in all the most important group exhibitions sculpture international.
At the end of the informal season, Somaini charges his sculptures with symbolic values (Portali, 1967), where organic forms are placed in a continuous dialectical relationship with geometric volumes of an architectural layout, which reach levels of high vision with the cycle of Carnifications of an architecture (1974-1976). In the conviction that sculpture must play a role in the redevelopment of the urban architectural fabric - matured during the informal experiences carried out on a large scale, between 1958 and 1972, in Italy and in the United States - the sculptor formalizes his ideas at a theoretical and utopian in a series of design studies (Crispolti, Somaini, Urgency in the city, Mazzotta, Milan 1972). Parallel to the reflection on the relationship between sculpture, architecture and the environmental context, Somaini experiments with a personal technique of direct carving practiced through the use of a jet of sand under high pressure, which since 1965 becomes a fundamental component of his plastic language. In 1975 the conceptual analysis of the laboratory procedures inherent in sculpture led the artist to the creation of a bas-relief "trace", obtained by rolling a sculpted "matrix" which, leaving an imprint in progress, develops and reveals a cryptic image entrusted to it in negative. Matrices and traces introduce the dynamic element, the action, the idea of a path, of an intervention involving architecture and the urban context. These new works are presented in the personal room at the Venice Biennale in 1978 (First trace and the matrix sculpture: Antropoammonite), in the anthology at the Wilhelm -Lehmbruck - Museum in Duisburg in 1979 (Development of an anthropomorphic landscape and matrix, 1978-79) and in the personal exhibition at the Botanical Gardens of Lucca in 1980 (Svolgimento dell'avvolto: tragic trace, 1979).
Starting in the mid-eighties, Somaini turned again to the execution of large-scale works, creating in Italy and Japan, where the dialectic of the imprint leads to the treatment of positive/negative forms, as in Porta d'Europa , Como 1995.
The artist proceeds to the direct carving of the marble with the jet of sand with compressed air starting from 1975 (Anthropoammonite I), an activity that continues in subsequent works of great commitment such as Fortunia (1988), in a series of Fights with the serpent characterized by an overwhelmingly vitalistic organicity, such as FortunaVincitrice (2000), installed near the motorway junction in Como. Works partly proposed in the anthology set up in the Palazzo di Brera in Milan in 1997, in the Quadrennial of Rome in 1999, in the Biennials of Carrara in 1998 and 2000 and in the anthology at the Castello di Pergine (Trento) in 2000. In recent years the sculptor increasingly combines the drawing and pictorial activity with the plastic one. In 1999 he puts his hand to a large series of works on paper which take up the myths and legends that have developed around Etna in a fantastic key, revisited also through the reading of Maria Corti (Magic Land Registry, Einaudi, 1999). In the following years he placed Fortunia Vincitrice (1997-2000) and Variations on a large vertical sculpture (2001) in the offices of the Bennet Shopping Center in Montano Lucino (Como).
He participates in some important exhibitions, such as Arts and Architecture, 1900-2000 curated by Germano Celant at the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa (2004), Italian Sculpture of the 2005th century at the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation and Annicinquanta. The birth of Italian creativity, Palazzo Reale in Milan (19). He died in Como on November 2005, 1957. The National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome dedicates the first posthumous retrospective to him, Il periodo informal 1964-2007 (XNUMX).
