Painting is back. Anni Ottanta, la pittura in Italia
from 02 June 2021 to 03 October 2021
Milano
Le Gallerie d’Italia – Piazza Scala present a special exhibition on the 1980s: a fresh perspective on Italian painting through a journey of emblems and case studies, conceived by Luca Massimo Barbero, Associate Curator of the Intesa Sanpaolo Modern and Contemporary Art Collections.
Starting with a title that is already a paradox – Painting is back – since painting in Italy has never actually faded away, more than forty years on from those multifaceted and vibrant 1980s, the exhibition offers an initial, disenchanted view of the artistic events and key figures of that decade who provocatively conceived of painting as a joyful and voracious capacity to depict the world of images with a new vitality and who, from the outset, enjoyed international visibility and immediate success.
The exhibition proceeds through insights – certainly not exhaustive but revealing – into the cross-cutting nature of the artists of that decade, which, in reality, began well before the designated dates and ended well in advance: hence the decision to open the exhibition with works from the late 1970s by Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Nicola De Maria and Mimmo Paladino – the protagonists of the Transavantgarde officially launched in 1979 by Achille Bonito Oliva in the pages of Flash Art – but also with those who, in the same years, were already active on the international painting scene, such as Franco Angeli, Mario Schifano, Salvo, Aldo Mondino and, in her singularity, Carol Rama.
A varied and seemingly contradictory exhibition itinerary, much like those years themselves, which, alongside surprising—and thus seminal—works by Gino De Dominicis or Luigi Ontani, presents an unexpected Mario Merz and the then-new media of Studio Azzurro’s video environment. Other figures, such as Mimmo Germanà and Ernesto Tatafiore, represent those artists present at the first international exhibitions, already emblematic of their own way of experiencing painting.
This was a decade that saw Milan become, in the collective memory, the symbol of a hedonistic lifestyle, yet which is now presented to us as an extraordinary system where art and fashion, design and entertainment, architecture and politics and finance intermingle in a veritable laboratory. In an atmosphere brimming with energy, numerous galleries operate, ready to capture the ferment of those years, represented in this exhibition by the names of Valerio Adami, Aldo Spoldi, Mimmo Rotella and Enrico Baj, to whom a final room is dedicated featuring an extraordinary ‘graffito on canvas’.
Through the 57 works on display, only a few aspects of this creative moment are recounted: that Italian wave which would also affect younger generations and constellations of new painters, who are not represented here but who signal the uniqueness of that moment.
Catalogo mostra "Painting is back"
Ritratto, 1986
tecnica mista e collage su linoleum
45,5 × 56 × 1,9 cm
Pensione Fuentes, 1985
olio su linoleum
320 × 180 cm
Opere correlate
Nessuna opera correlata trovata