WOPART Fair will offer a fascinating journey through all eras of art history, delving into the techniques and languages that characterize works exclusively created on paper, from ancient drawings to modern prints, from artist's books to art photography, from watercolor and oriental prints to papers by contemporary artists, presented by a sample of 50 international galleries.
The selection of exhibitors is guaranteed by a scientific committee chaired by Giandomenico Di Marzio, journalist, critic and contemporary art curator and by Paolo Manazza, painter and journalist specializing in art economics, which also includes art historians and critics and of photography, collectors, university professors among the most appreciated, such as Michele Bonuomo, Marco Carminati, Gianluigi Colin, Massimo Di Carlo, Walter Guadagnini, Giuseppe Iannaccone, Piero Mascitti, Marco Meneguzzo, Anna Orlando, Elena Pontiggia, Massimo Pulini, Marco Riccòmini, Marco Vallora.
WOPART will offer a vast program of side events that will help the public to explore the most topical issues proposed by the Lugano fair. Among these we highlight the Art Conversations, which will see alternating lectio magistralis of art critics and historians, consultants, art investment specialists, or the Artist talks, unique opportunities to get to know the international protagonists of the art market first-hand art, their experiences and their artistic journey and which will be streamed on the event website (www.wopart.eu).
The exhibition project of the fair is completed by a program of four exhibitions, which investigate the theme of the portrait through different media and languages, from the 150th century to the present day. The portraits of Palazzo Belgioioso – When artists paint artists, curated by Massimo Pulini, accompanies the public in Milan during the Risorgimento, in one of the most popular cultural salons of the period: the so-called “cenacolo” of Palazzo Belgioioso, headquarters of the Società degli Artists and Patriotics, meeting and comparison point for writers, intellectuals and of course painters and sculptors; notable presence in the city, starting from the years of the unification of Italy and until the advent of Fascism. A substantial heritage that passed from the Company to the Baratti Collection: we are talking about a corpus of at least 34 portraits of the various members, including Domenico Induno, Giuseppe Bertini, Eleuterio Pagliano, Sebastiano De Albertis, Federico Faruffini, Angelo Morbelli, Achille Beltrame. Precisely from this last block of works comes the selection of XNUMX drawings exhibited, for the first time in Switzerland, in the context of WOPART, a determining document for reconstructing the environment and the figures of a bourgeois living room which was a training ground for talents and excellence .
The 40 cards presented in the exhibition Caricature at the turn of the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries - The satirical vein and the mockery among drawing masters, curated by Massimo Pulini, also come from the Baratti Collection. The environment is the same - we are still in the context of the Society of Artists and Patriotic - but the spirit of the portraits signed by the various Giuseppe Palanti or Mario Bettinelli changes radically, which by revealing an unexpected verve demonstrate, as Pulini observes, "the great modernity of these authors, skilled swordsmen of the pen and merciless boxers of the coal, and it is precisely the uninhibited terrain of irony that gives us back the lively and fertile atmosphere that one had to live in that place, in that circle of talents”.
There are about twenty autographs presented in the exhibition Gianni Maimeri's musicians - A selection of drawings by concert musicians from Stravinsky to Toscanini, which, curated by Paolo Manazza, offers a tribute to the figure of Maimeri (1884 - 1951), an extraordinary chronicler in images of one of the most glorious periods of the Scala in Milan. The pencils on display come from the permanent exhibition set up in the spaces of the "laVerdi" Auditorium in Milan and restore the climate of close interpenetration between different creative languages that has always distinguished the Lombard capital, a city where music, literature and the visual arts never fail to intertwine their own paths following common trajectories.
The exhibition Aurelio Amendola, the faces of art – Twenty-two masterful portraits of 1938th-century artists, curated by Walter Guadagnini, ideally concludes WOPART's excursus on the theme of the portrait. The exhibition presents a nucleus of photographs which see Amendola (Pistoia, XNUMX) investigate the soul and spirit of great contemporary names, for once no longer the "subject" creator of works of art but the "object" portrayed. Thus we pass without interruption from Alberto Burri to Mimmo Paladino, from Andy Warhol to Giorgio de Chirico up to Roy Lichtenstein, for a gallery of the most influential personalities of Italian and international art of the XNUMXth century.
