curated by Chiara Gatti and Stefano Giuliani, with the contribution of Matteo Meschiari
project developed thanks to the participation of Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, Majorca, Musée du Louvre and Fondation Giacometti, Paris
What deep bond connects an island to its simulacra?
And how did the twentieth-century masters travelling between the
Mediterranean and South Seas absorb and interpret them?
The exhibition Islands and Idols, which opens the summer season at the Museo MAN in Nuoro, was conceived to explore these very questions. It seeks to understand how the symbolic and mythical power of archaic figures – preserved within the boundaries of island life – was regenerated, centuries later, in modern artistic forms.
Poised between the Neolithic age and the dawn of the twentieth century, between archaeology and the avant-garde, between Cycladic idols and the wooden sculptures carved by Gauguin during his years in Tahiti, the exhibition traces a journey that flows between past and present. It seeks out echoes, shared sensibilities, ancestral legacies and expressive impulses – forces that resurface in cyclical waves, like geological rhythms – guiding the hands of artists as they endeavour to shape kindred forms. It is not, then, the familiar notion of the traveller who explores, discovers, absorbs and replicates. Rather, it is the more vital idea that the ancient and the modern meet beyond the confines of time and space, both sustained by the same fundamental impulse: to give form to the elsewhere through statues, steles and monoliths that embody the invisible on earth.
Chiara Gatti writes in her text: “No postcolonial revisionism is required to affirm that there is nothing primitive, exotic or unsettling in their hieratic presence. It is abstraction in its purest form. They are mother goddesses – merciful and majestic in equal measure – reminiscent of Egyptian mourners, Etruscan offerers or handmaids lifted from the surfaces of Greek vases. Their gazes, fixed on the void, absorbed in a Casorati-like stillness, evoke the disarmed immobility of Dürer’s Melencolia – an allegory of the human intellect in silent meditation on the fate of the cosmos.”
Taking a critical stance as a reflection on the everyday notions of otherness and primitivism, and their repercussions in the heart of the postcolonial debate that extends well beyond art history, the exhibition explores the anthropological reasons behind the presence of totemic figures within the circumscribed space of the island. It examines how masters of the stature of Gauguin, Pechstein, Miró, Arp and Matisse, during their journeys, reimagined this coexistence by projecting their own sculptural icons into the realm of the sacred.
Beginning with Gauguin’s first “escape” to Brittany in 1886, rooted in the idea of the island as an ideal place, untouched by the excesses of civilization, the exhibition retraces the journeys of artists such as Jean Arp, who collected Cycladic statuettes, drawn to their concentrated magnetism, and Max Pechstein, who in 1914 reached the Palau archipelago. There, on the island of Angaur, he lived among the local communities and depicted male faces with the solemnity of deities. “I saw carved idols in which a trembling mercy and reverent fear of nature’s inscrutable power had etched hope, dread and awe onto faces confronting their inescapable fate.” Joan Miró, in his daily notes, invoked the Moai statues of Easter Island as a potent source of inspiration for new sculptural forms, recognizing in them the embodiment of an ancestral spirit. And then there was Alberto Giacometti, who discovered his own island among the erratic boulders of Maloja, transforming each of his portraits into an idol, a temple guardian, kneeling before the immaterial.
In his text in the catalogue, Matteo Meschiari writes: “The aim here is not so much to examine the sociology, philosophy and geopolitics of being and living on an island, but rather to understand how the geomorphology of Earth and Sea holds fossils of mythical thinking, how the encounter between rock and water serves as a morphogenetic field, one capable of generating myth. The conceptual stereotypes associated with islands act as a dark filter: exclusion, separation, loneliness, shipwreck, entrenchment, prison, exile, confinement – just to name the most prevalent. Yet, as soon as we turn to ocean-centred cultures, such as those of the Vikings or Polynesians, we recognize that the West is entrenched in a geocentric colonial paradigm that consistently privileges land. This continental perspective sustains a hegemonic geographical model where the sea is regarded as empty space. For those who live at sea, however, water is the centre of the world. Their maps depict submerged landscapes and currents, while islands – especially oceanic ones – are small interruptions, areas of suspension within the vast, salty immensity. The archipelago, in this view, becomes a hyper-object, pierced and bound together by the dynamism of the waters, by the very fullness of the sea.”
The selection of more than seventy works includes archaeological finds from Sardinia’s major archaeological museums, the Menhir Museum in Laconi and museums in Brittany, as well as an exceptional loan from the Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities at the Musée du Louvre in Paris. Alongside these, works by modern masters come from important European collections, including the National Gallery Prague (for Gauguin’s wooden sculptures), the Galleria d’arte moderna in Milan, the Musée départemental Maurice Denis, the Museo della città di Locarno, the Fondation Giacometti and the Archives Henri Matisse, as well as the Florence Henri Archive and Italian private collections such as Diffusione Italia International Group srl and Enrico Sesana’s print collection.
Lastly, a section dedicated to prehistoric Sardinia offers an in-depth look at the world of idols in Sardinia, centred around four main themes: the bull (a male symbol associated with the cult of power and fertility), the Mother Goddess (a female figure linked to birth and the continuity of life), the “upside down figure” (representing the afterlife and ritual reversal), and anthropomorphic menhir statues, true idols carved in stone and destined to dominate the landscape as eternal presences.
The exhibition design, curated by architect Giovanni Maria Filindeu, arranges the works in a spatial composition that evokes an archipelago of small thematic islands. The placement of elements on both walls and floor is shaped by a deliberate and thoughtful use of colour and materials. Display bases are crafted from Celenit, a composite of wood fibre and cement, paired with washed sand, a natural, evocative binder whose cool tones harmonize with the summer palette of textures, sketching out metaphysical maps across the space.
ISLANDS AND IDOLS
Museo MAN, Nuoro – 27 June – 16 November 2025
curated by Chiara Gatti and Stefano Giuliani, with the contribution of Matteo Meschiari
coordination by Rita Moro and Myrtille Montaud
set-up by Giovanni Maria Filindeu
with Giampaolo Scifo, Anna Usai and Bartolomeo Filindeu
graphic image Gianfranco Setzu
catalogue edizioni Interlinea (Italian | English)
Press Office
STUDIO ESSECI – Sergio Campagnolo
Via San Mattia 16, 35121 Padova
Tel. +39.049.663499
contact person Simone Raddi, simone@studioesseci.net
www.studioesseci.net