September 12, 2018

 

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.
FROM BOCCIONI TO ROTELLA TO CONTEMPORARIES

THE MAON COLLECTION

curated by Bruno Corà and Tonino Sicoli

 

From September 13 to October 14, 35 works from the MAON will be exhibited at the Stelline Foundation, to raise awareness of the important 20th-century collection of the Calabrian museum.

Also on display is an unpublished work by Umberto Boccioni, Seascape with Trees (1908), presented to the public for the first time in 2017, as well as works by more than 30 artists, including Mimmo Rotella and Alik Cavaliere.

With the inauguration on September 12, 2018 at 6:30 pm, on the occasion of the “Novecento Italiano” program of the Municipality of Milan, which documents the history of art from the historical avant-gardes to the contemporary, the Stelline Foundation presents the exhibition CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. FROM BOCCIONI TO ROTELLA TO CONTEMPORARIES, curated by Bruno Corà and Tonino Sicoli (from 13 September to 14 October 2018).

The aim is to introduce the 20th century collection of the MAON – Museum of 19th and 20th century art in Rende (CS) to the general public.

Thirty-five works are exhibited in a chronological narrative from the early 20th century to the 21st century.

The highlight of the collection is an unpublished pre-futurist painting by Umberto Boccioni, Seascape with Trees, attributable to the great artist's Milanese period and presented to the public for the first time in 2017. The work, discovered in a Roman collection, is characterized by a subtle painting, rapid and filamentary, which connects to several pre-futurist works from the Chiattone collection in Lugano, all executed around 1908. Another prominent figure in the exhibition is Mimmo Rotella, the leading artist of Nouveau Réalisme, a link between Dadaism and Pop Art, an inventive bridge between the use of ready-mades (pieces of paper torn from posters on city walls) and the icons of cinematographic advertising. Among the works of over 30 artists present, there are also the assemblages of bronze objects and twigs by Alik Cavaliere, professor and director of the Brera Academy in Milan, as well as one of the first artists to have exhibited at the Stelline Foundation.

The exhibition itinerary is divided into two temporal sections: 1900-1945 / The Historical Avant-gardes and the Italian Twentieth Century: with works by Enzo Benedetto, Umberto Boccioni, Achille Capizzano, Domenico Colao, Michele Guerrisi, Maria Grandinetti Mancuso, Antonio Marasco; 1945-2000 / The Postwar Period and New Trends: with works by Cesare Berlingeri, Giancarlo Cauteruccio, Alik Cavaliere, Francesco Correggia, Luigi Di Sarro, Salvatore Dominelli, Francomà, Giuseppe Gallo, Antonio Gatto, Francesco Guerrieri, Bruno La Vergata, Domenico Lo Russo, Francesco Lupinacci, Luigi Magli, Max Marra, Mario Parentela, Rocco Pangaro, Antonio Passa, Pietro Perrone, Alfredo Pirri, Antonio Pujia Veneziano, Anna Romanello, Mimmo Rotella, Angelo Savelli, Nunzio Solendo, Giulio Telarico, Aldo Turchiaro, Fiorenzo Zaffina.

The choice to document an area, also capturing the so-called genius loci, does not mean the desire to do cultural anthropology, but rather to take into consideration the connections with the general climate, with the current trends, with the lines of research and the historical-linguistic references of a broader scope.

The exhibition of the Stelline Foundation has the patronage of the Lombardy Region and the Calabria Region, the Municipality of Milan and the Municipality of Rende, and is organized in collaboration with the associations Centro “A. Capizzano” of Rende and “Aleph Arte” of Lamezia Terme.

MAON - Museo d'Arte dell'Otto e Novecento is a Calabrian museum that was inaugurated on May 4, 2004 on the initiative of the Center for Art and Culture “A. Capizzano” of Rende. year” of Rende (Cs). After seven years of intense exhibition activity, the Center has acquired permanent collections and established the Museum, born from a project by the art critic Tonino Sicoli, who is its director.

Among the major exhibitions organized by the MAON, we should mention the two dedicated to Umberto Boccioni (one in 2008 on the drawings of the Winston Malbin Collection, curated by Enrico Crispolti and Tonino Sicoli, and the other in 2009 for the Centenary of Futurism, curated by Bruno Corà, Cristina Sonderegger, Maurizio Calvesi and Sicoli, in partnership with the Lugano Museum, the one for the Celebrations of the Centenary of the Birth of Alberto Burri in 2015 (curated by Corà, and Sicoli) and two in homage to Mimmo Rotella (“Around Rotella”, curated by Corà and Sicoli in 2009; “Rotella Vs Dada”, curated by Sicoli in 2018).

THE ARTISTS ON SHOW

1900 -1945 / THE HISTORICAL AVANTGARDE AND THE ITALIAN TWENTIETH CENTURY

Works by: Enzo Benedetto, Umberto Boccioni, Achille Capizzano, Domenico Colao, Michele Guerrisi, Maria Grandinetti Mancuso, Antonio Marasco.

The highlight of the collection is an unpublished pre-futurist painting by Umberto Boccioni, discovered in a Roman collection: Seascape with Trees is a work with subtle, rapid and filamentary painting, which is connected to several pre-futurist works in the Chiattone collection in Lugano, all executed around 1908. Many painters of a century with widespread radicalism gravitated around Boccioni, both in terms of the poetics he embraced and the movements, which bring together the supporters of new ideas. Antonio Marasco, who in 1906 left Nicastro for Florence, an exponent of Aeropittura or Second Futurism, was immediately “captured” by the strong personality of Marinetti, who invited him to follow him on his trip to Russia for a series of conferences in Moscow and Petersburg (1914).

In June of the same year in Florence he met Umberto Boccioni, who called him “a companion in miracles”. Between the 1920s and 1930s, the South was a flourishing of artistic experiences linked in some way to Futurism: if the original Futurism made converts in the workerist and metropolitan climate of Northern Italy, in the following decades it found fertile ground in the intellectual and rural bourgeoisie of the southern provinces. Enzo Benedetto, from Reggio, later moved to Rome, began his relationship with Futurism in 1924 with the publication in Calabria of the magazine Originalità, in the first issue of which an editorial by Marinetti was published contesting the XIV Venice Biennale, guilty of having excluded the Futurists. Domenico Colao left Italy in 1908 for Paris, where he settled in Montmartre.

He lived the exhilarating experience of that neighborhood, frequenting Anselmo Bucci, Leonardo Dudreville and Gino Severini, and was included by Margherita Sarfatti in the exhibition of the Novecento Italiano (Milan, 1926). Michele Guerrisi was a prominent figure in the circles of Italian academies and was a member of the Higher Council of Antiquities and Fine Arts, highly appreciated by Benedetto Croce as a sculptor and for his general and philosophical culture. Maria Grandinetti Mancuso is an illustrator for Valori Plastici (1918), whose Roman salon is frequented by Carrà, De Chirico, d’Annunzio, Ungaretti and the major intellectuals of the time.

Achille Capizzano, collaborator of the architect Luigi Moretti and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, creates five mosaics of the Foro Italico, winning in 1942 the competition for the creation of a large mural at the Palazzo dei Congressi in EUR with the sketch L'Impero.

1945-2000 / THE POST-WAR PERIOD AND NEW TRENDS

Works by: Cesare Berlingeri, Giancarlo Cauteruccio, Alik Cavaliere, Francesco Correggia, Luigi Di Sarro, Salvatore Dominelli, Francomà, Giuseppe Gallo, Antonio Gatto, Francesco Guerrieri, Bruno La Vergata, Domenico Lo Russo, Francesco Lupinacci, Luigi Magli, Max Marra, Mario Parentela, Rocco Pangaro, Antonio Passa, Pietro Perrone, Alfredo Pirri, Antonio Pujia Veneziano, Anna Romanello, Mimmo Rotella, Angelo Savelli, Nunzio Solendo, Giulio Telarico, Aldo Turchiaro, Fiorenzo Zaffina.

The extreme modern triggered by the historical avant-gardes finds in the post-war period a climate of research that reconciles strongly conceptual positions with experiments on materials and technologies, contaminations of genres with linguistic paradoxes, a rebellious transversalism with invasive globalization.

A prominent figure on the international scene is Mimmo Rotella, the leading artist of Nouveau Réalisme, a link between Dadaism and Pop Art, a bridge of inventiveness between the use of ready made (pieces of paper torn from posters on urban walls) and the icons of cinema advertising.

Angelo Savelli, who lived mainly in New York, with his white dematerializes the absolute in a monochrome and refined minimalism of subtle brilliance. In this section you can also admire the assemblages of bronze objects and twigs by Alik Cavaliere, son of a Calabrian chemist-poet, professor and director of the Brera Academy in Milan; the research of Francesco Guerrieri connected to Optical Art; Antonio Passa, director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome; the compositions with human and zoomorphic silhouettes by Giuseppe Gallo, painter-sculptor of the Roman group of San Lorenzo; the postmodern and minimalist installations of Alfredo Pirri. And again, the written-pictorial and performative works of Francesco Correggia, professor at the Brera Academy; the folded painting of Cesare Berlingeri; the laser art bordering on theatre by Giancarlo Cauteruccio, founder of the Florentine group Kripton; the meeting between art and science, between writing and photography by Luigi Di Sarro, professor at the Academy of Rome killed by mistake during the Years of Lead; the technological realism of Aldo Turchiaro, a student of Guttuso, and the new urban and metaphysical figuration of Nunzio Solendo, also professors at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. Space is also given to the fantastic-storytelling neo-figuration of Francomà, to the painting-sculpture-writing of Mario Parentela, to the naturalistic installations and material works of Luigi Magli and Rocco Pangaro, respectively professor and director of the Academy of Fine Arts of Catanzaro, to the minimalism of signs and the ceramic works of Antonio Pujia Veneziano. There is also room for the stories hidden between sheet metal and historical citations of Francesco Lupinacci, headmaster of the Art High School of Cosenza; the science-art of Domenico Lo Russo, artist-chief physician of plastic surgery in Florence; the excavations in the walls and in the plexiglass of Fiorenzo Zaffina, art director of the covers of the weekly L’Espresso; the artist's books and photo-chalcographs of Anna Romanello, a student of the French engraver Willian Hayter, and the pictorial evocations with abstract-naturalistic archetypes of Salvatore Dominelli, both professors at the Academy of Rome. Finally, the graphic chimeras of Bruno La Vergata, professor at the Academy of Fine Arts of Catanzaro, cannot be missed; the monochrome and plastic tables of Pietro Perrone, professor at the Giulio C. Argan Art School in Rome; the minimal signs and ideograms of Giulio Telarico, professor at the Boccioni Art School in Cosenza; the metal installations and the Arte Povera assemblages of Antonio Gatto; the material-mystical creations of Max Marra, who lives between Monza and Lissone.

Opening hours: Tuesday – Sunday, 10:00 am – 8:00 pm (closed on Mondays)

Free admission Fondazione Stelline, c.so Magenta 61, Milan

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