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Category :Art Exhibits |
Written by: Elena Lanzanova
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Revival Of Art From The Legendary Sixties In Rome
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Monday 23 May 2011
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After the second world war, Italy awoke to a new dawn and “cancelled” the sad memory of the twenty years of fascism. The Bel Paese came back to life and started enjoying the comforts of the wealth which would have soon led to the “economic miracle”. A memorable period characterised not only by a definite improvement in the standard of living of families, but also by an important creative revolution: literature, cinema (Fellini with the cult film La Dolce Vita) and visual arts. It was the turning point of Italian art culture, the dawn of an extraordinary season which is now being re-evoked in the exhibition Gli irripetibili anni ’60. Un dialogo tra Roma e Milano, on view at the Museo Fondazione Roma until 31st July (it will then move to Palazzo Reale in Milan, from 7th September to 20th November).
The exhibition, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, has original features which highlight the essential role of the cultural interactions between Rome and Milan in the Sixties, identifying in the two cities the creative centres of the new experimentations and researches in art. “With this exhibition – claims Emmanuele Emanuele, President of Fondazione Roma – we want to represent to the general public what was a turning point in the art culture of our country, a decade of avant-garde research centred in the creative settings of Rome and Milan in the Sixties. In those years Rome and Milan were big laboratory cities, where the vitality of a society in rapid economic and cultural revolution found its visual expression in a creative and dynamic artistic scene which was able to understand and offer projects of international worthiness”.
More than 170 works on view represent the figures that animated the two Italian cities, balanced between the most desecrating heritage of the avant-gardes and the anticipation of conceptual research, between the provocation of the “tabula rasa” of the monochrome and optical and kinetic experimentation, between Nouveau Réalisme and Pop Art.
An art-performance which found in some galleries its vital setting. Starting from the Giorgio Marconi Studio in Milan which, with other realities, made Milan an emblematic laboratory of the emerging contemporary visual arts. While the counter alter in the capital was represented by the insightful activity of L’Obelisco, La Tartaruga, La Salita and L’Attico. According to the president of Fondazione Roma “The Sixties represent the last great phase of Italian art. It was the end of a dramatic period and suddenly there was a new wave of creative freedom. And the great European and American artists were not left uninvolved”.
Therefore, the event recounts these two poles of antagonist and complementary creativity – the Capital became the propulsive centre of the national scene, while Milan was the centre of development for international avant-garde movements – through four sections which illustrate the various routes taken by artistic research during the decade. The exhibition opens with Monochrome and Abstraction, a trend which started in the late Fifties, which focuses on expressive reduction with particular attention for monochrome, often white surfaces. Star of this section is Lucio Fontana and his Spatialism. The artist is accompanied by a number of important representatives who shared the experience of the magazine/gallery Azimuth/Azimut of Milan (artists such as Piero Manzoni, Enrico Castellani, Dadamaino, Agostino Bonalumi and Paolo Scheggi). An extremely important presence in Milan is that of Yves Klein who, in 1957, presented his monochromes to the Apollinaire gallery, becoming the main point of reference for the new artistic generation.
The second section is entitled Pop objects and images, dedicated to the dialogue between the retrieval of objects and icons which characterized the Nouveau Réalisme and the emergent Pop Art culture. The experiments with objects performed by the Nouveau Réalistes, which developed in Milan in 1960 around the Apollinaire gallery, are documented by the works of Mimmo Rotella, Arman, César, Raymond Hains, Jacques Villeglé and Christo. In Rome, the parallel and interweaved line of creative investigation continued in dialogue with the emerging Pop culture, founded on the review and desecration of traditional materials and icons expressed by Mario Schifano, Franco Angeli, Tano Festa, Giosetta Fioroni, Cesare Tacchi and Sergio Lombardo. Among the most singular loans of this section, there are four important works by David Hockney from the early Sixties, two of which come from the Berardo Collection and the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum of Madrid, a large sculpture made of assembled barrels painted by Christo, a Homage to Arman by Rotella and some works belonging to the sparkling cycle Tuttestelle by Schifano.
Internationality and new sculpture is the third space of the exhibition at Museo Fondazione in Rome. The section focuses on Milan and its role of “factory” of new images in dialogue with Pop Art from New York and London and with the great masters of Dadaism and Surrealism. Not only. In those years Milan was also the centre of neo-industrial matrixes which promoted scientific research in relation to the metropolitan experience. In this context, the works of the T Group exemplify the so-called “programmed art” and the opening of research to a complex relation between architecture and spatiality.
Finally, the exhibition ends with Materials, Signs and Figures and deals with the new conceptual and analytical art founded on the relationship between words, signs and images. This type of art soon became interweaved with the double artistic experimentation that characterised the second half of the decade: on the one hand, the choice of heterodox materials in a new conceptual key (Alighiero Boetti, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis and Eliseo Mattiacci); on the other, the adoption of a new type of figuration, in the works of Valerio Adami and Emilio Taidni which hold Pop culture in a state of poetic and narrative suspension. Between materials and figures there are the works by Gianni Dova, Roberto Crippa, Enrico Baj, Lucio Del Pezzo, while the works by Bruno Di Bello and Gianni Bertini can be related to mechanical procedures of figuration. The new dimensions of sculpture are then illustrated by the works of Giuseppe Uncini, Arnaldo and Giò Pomodoro. These are researches that find their international counterpoint in foreign artists present in Milan in the same years, such as Hsiao Chin, William T. Wiley, Antonio Dias, Peter Caulfield, Eduardo Paolozzi, Allen Jones, Louise Nevelson, who confirm the authentically dynamic and international dimension of this context.
From 10th May to 31st July 2011
Gli irripetibili anni ’60. Un dialogo tra Roma e Milano
Museo Fondazione Roma, Palazzo Cipolla
Via del Corso, 320 – Roma
Web: www.fondazioneromamuseo.it
Mail: info@fondazioneromamuseo.it
Tel: +39 06 39967888
Opening times: every day from 10 am to 8 pm; closed on Mondays
Entrance: full 10 euros; reduced 8 euros; schools 4.50 euros.
Tags: Enrico Baj, Tano Festa, Christo, Emilio Tadini, Valerio Adami, Mimmo Rotella, Gianni Bertini, Arman, Raymond Hains, Roberto Crippa, Peter Caulfield, Bruno Di Bello, Giosetta Fioroni, Luca Massimo Barbero, Gli irripetibili anni ‘60. Un dialogo tra Roma e Milano, Luciano Fabro, Alighiero Boetti, Louise Nevelson, Allen Jones, Paolo Scheggi, Mario Schifano, Jannis Kounellis, Hsiao Chin, Antonio Dias, Gli irrepetibili anni ’60. Un dialogo tra Roma e Milano, Museo Fondazione Roma, Jacques Villeglé, Eduardo Paolozzi, Eliseo Mattiacci, David Hockney, Sergio Lombardo, William T. Wiley, Lucio Del pezzo, Gruppo T, Franco Angeli, Agostino Bonalumi, Enrico Castellani, Roma, Gianni Dova, iero Manzoni, Cesare Tacchi, César, Dadamaino
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Tags: Paolo Scheggi, Gli irripetibili anni ‘60. Un dialogo tra Roma e Milano, Dadamaino, Gianni Dova, Franco Angeli, Eliseo Mattiacci, César, Roma, Agostino Bonalumi, William T. Wiley, Allen Jones, Alighiero Boetti, Gianni Bertini, Arman, Christo, Enrico Castellani, Louise Nevelson, Hsiao Chin, Cesare Tacchi, Gruppo T, David Hockney, Giosetta Fioroni, Luciano Fabro, Lucio Del pezzo, Gli irrepetibili anni ’60. Un dialogo tra Roma e Milano, Peter Caulfield, Antonio Dias, Jannis Kounellis, Roberto Crippa, Enrico Baj, Jacques Villeglé, Tano Festa, Eduardo Paolozzi, Museo Fondazione Roma, Raymond Hains, Bruno Di Bello, Mario Schifano, Luca Massimo Barbero, Emilio Tadini, Valerio Adami, Mimmo Rotella, Sergio Lombardo, iero Manzoni
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