Umberto Boccioni, early works at the Bottegantica Gallery

There are numerous exhibitions that have investigated the figure and work of Umberto Boccioni in recent decades. Few, however, are those who have scientifically retraced the youthful and formative phase of the Calabrian artist, in which the study of the past is linked to the irrepressible desire to know the present and to experience the future. It is dedicated to this period – full of suggestions – the exhibition "The young Boccioni" 30 April 2021 - 30 June 2021, with which Galleria Bottegantica inaugurates the 2021 exhibition season. The influence of the various European figurative currents and the interest in the classical and Renaissance tradition repeatedly emerge in the works of the period and find, above all in the graphic production, a valid laboratory of experimental analysis, invention and stylistic verification which Boccioni conducts in parallel to the painting. 

The exhibition dedicates particular interest to the work on paper through a selection of drawings that cover the years of the apprenticeship of the young Boccioni. To a first nucleus of works - with a strong scholastic imprint - dating back to the period in which he was pupil of Giacomo Balla and attended pictorial and nude drawing schools in Rome, is joined by another - more copious and diversified - attributable to the immediately following years, in which the stroke acquires confidence in giving us precise architectural visions, curious portraits - some of which border on caricature - and human figures of extreme formal synthesis. The museum copies also belong to this apprenticeship period. Another aspect on which the exhibition focuses attention concerns the commercial tempera paintings that Boccioni painted in recent years for mostly economic reasons. The eagerness to learn and to refine one's artistic skills also characterizes the artist's Venetian period, during which he experiments - under the guidance of the painter Alessandro Zezzos - with the engraving technique, whose results, really interesting, are well documented in the Milanese exhibition .

The exhibition itinerary of the exhibition ends - like the artist's formative one - with the transfer of Boccioni to Milan, in September 1907. The interest in the works of Giovanni Segantini, Carlo Fornara and Gaetano Previati - admired for a few months first at the Venice Biennale – oriented the young man towards the search for a style capable of reconciling positivist modernity with idealism in the field of illustration and poster design. The coeval pictorial production finds expression in small views of Lombard landscapes which however demonstrate an overcoming of the impressionist plot still present in the canvases of the Venetian period. In the portrait side, where the brush becomes feverish in its urgency to restore the singularity of a face, an expression or a character on the canvas.

In the exhibition these themes are testified by valuable works, such as Lombard landscape and The sick mother of 1908. Others instead document the symbolist parenthesis of 1908-1910, which finds its most heartbreaking and esoteric outcome in mourning. Equally interesting are the sketches for the poster of the painting and sculpture exhibition promoted by the Artistic Family in Brunate (May-June 1909): perfect synthesis of the different stylistic figures acquired up to now by Boccioni, from divisionism, to the broad and synthetic post-impressionist brushstroke, to the echoes of modernism.
The exhibition is accompanied by an important catalogue, published by Bottegantica editions, with contributions by Virginia Baradel, Ester Coen and Niccolò D'Agati, a list of drawings and temperas edited by Niccolò D'Agati.