MAN_Museo d'Arte della Provincia di Nuoro

Ilaria Turba. I pani del desiderio
2025-09-19 - 2025-11-02
Curated by Elisabetta Masala

A wish, a dough, a shared work of art.
I pani del desiderio (The Breads of Desire) is a participatory art project born from a simple, universal gesture: making bread. And yet, the loaves of Ilaria Turba are not made only of flour, water, and yeast—they also hold dreams, memories, and shared aspirations. In a time marked by fragmentation and uncertainty, the symbolic and communal value of ritual breads from the Mediterranean is elevated through an artistic and social act, capable of generating empathy and deep listening.
The exhibition Ilaria Turba. I pani del desiderio marks the final stage of a long journey through territories, communities, and desires. After years of encounters and exchanges, the artist shares with the public a reflection on the profound meaning of a collective and transformative experience. The project began in 2018 in the northern neighborhoods of Marseille, where, as an associate artist at the national theatre LE ZEF, Ilaria Turba led a series of workshops with the local community. It was in this context that over one hundred bread-sculptures were created: unique forms made collectively and inspired by the desires of each participant.
Beginning in 2022, I pani del desiderio evolved into a journey across Italy, with each stop involving museums, festivals, local associations, and residents. From Milan to Fontecchio, from Florence to Castiglione delle Stiviere, and finally to the medieval stone village of Ghesc in Piedmont, each location offered an opportunity to regenerate the gesture, activate new dialogues with communities, and create entirely new forms.
The final Italian stop of this traveling project took place in the village of Villaurbana, in the province of Oristano, as part of the Fondazione di Sardegna’s AR/S – Arte Condivisa program. It is in Sardinia—a land deeply rooted in the tradition of ritual bread making—that the project findes its symbolic completion: a return to matter, memory, and the gestures that bring people together. During a collective celebration in the forest of S’Arangiu Aresti, the artist shared the stories behind each of the more than one hundred breads gathered during the journey, before entrusting them to fire in a symbolic act of transformation. As in ancient rituals, their metamorphosis does not signify an end, but rather a passage toward rebirth. The resulting brilliant black ash becomes a symbol of desires that have shed their form and merged with one another. As the artist states in the video accompanying the exhibition, “The shapes that disappear remain in memory, in traces, in the stories that can still be passed on. They have not vanished; they have simply returned to their essence—the same essence from which every desire was born.”
The exhibition I pani del desiderio retraces the entire journey, inviting visitors to symbolically follow the path from Marseille to Sardinia through a selection of works—some of which are being shown for the first time—transforming the museum into a living space of connection, listening, and care. In a present that demands imagination and new forms of closeness and humanity, Ilaria Turba invites us to begin with a simple, universal gesture: to give shape to a desire and share it with others.
Ilaria Turba
The work of visual artist Ilaria Turba (www.ilariaturba.com) unfolds through interdisciplinary, participatory, and relational projects that involve communities, specific groups, and territories—often within complex or challenging contexts. Her practice is rooted in direct exchange with people, incorporating their voices, actions, and stimuli into her creations. These take the form of installations, public art, images, objects, artist’s books, performances, and celebratory moments. Turba’s work is distinguished by its coherence, aesthetic sensibility, and emotional depth, particularly evident in her inclusive processes and the reimagining of the themes she chooses to explore. A recurring element in her practice is dialogue with both private and public archives.
Ilaria Turba was the recipient of the 9th edition of the Italian Council in 2020. Her work has been featured at: Mucem, Marseille; LE ZEF Scène Nationale de Marseille; Manifesta13; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d’Arles; Performative, MAXXI L’Aquila; Festival Trajectoires, Nantes; Fondazione Prada; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Brooklyn Children’s Museum, NYC; Museo della Triennale, Milan; Festival Animac, Catalonia; Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea, Milan; Festival Filosofia, Modena; Festival Fotografia Europea, Reggio Emilia.

Minor Islands. Photographic Notes from 1990 to Today
2025-06-27 - 2025-11-16
Curated by Walter Guadagnini and Giangavino Pazzola
Coordinated by Elisabetta Masala

The MAN Museo d’Arte della Provincia di Nuoro and the Galleria Comunale d’Arte di Cagliari are pleased to present Minor Islands. Photographic Notes from 1990 to Today, a major photographic exhibition bringing together sixteen projects by international artists on the theme of representing the island from the beginning of the new century to the present day.
Scheduled to open on 26 June in Cagliari and 27 June in Nuoro, the exhibition project focuses not only on the geographical dimension, but also on the cultural and social aspects of the concept of insularity. It is curated by Walter Guadagnini and Giangavino Pazzola, featuring photographic works by Jacopo Benassi, Paola De Pietri, Charles Freger, Ralph Gibson, Mimmo Jodice, Salvatore Ligios, Bernard Plossu, Marinella Senatore, Giovanna Silva, Massimo Vitali, Lorenzo Vitturi, Vanessa Winship and George Georgeou (in Nuoro); Arianna Arcara, Francois Xavier Gbré, Luca Spano and Karla Hiraldo Voleau (in Cagliari).
Photographed in the past by renowned figures such as August Sander, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lisetta Carmi and many others, Sardinia has largely been interpreted and depicted through a reportage-style lens, with a focus on its landscapes and the communities of its interior regions. These visual accounts have contributed to a social imagery marked by a polarization between the central state and the periphery, shaping representations, myths and ideologies that have, over time, influenced both how islanders perceive themselves and how Sardinia is viewed by outsiders. The stereotypical perception oscillated between an image of Sardinia as a place suspended in time – a kind of Eden – and a contrasting vision tainted by the equally exoticized presence of bandits from crime reports, remote hinterlands and other references associated with underdevelopment.
The exhibition highlights how this representation has evolved over the past twenty-five years, marked by an expanded visual exploration that embraces new ways of engaging with both the territory and its communities. The emerging symbolic and ideological portrayals of the island’s space provide an insight into a range of themes, from cultural histories to the transformation of contemporary society, while also revealing glimpses of persistent subordination. By turning their gaze to the coastline and the sea, as well as to the interiors of the island’s larger urban centres, artists have developed a visual vocabulary of Sardinia that situates it culturally within the broader Mediterranean context, prior even to its placement within the Italian one.
The exhibition opens with a prologue-tribute to four distinguished photographers who, over the years, have devoted significant works to Sardinia, both as part of their own artistic journeys and through their reinterpretations of the island’s landscape. Mimmo Jodice’s marine metaphysics, rooted in Mediterranean culture and captured at Punta Pedrosa (1998) and Molara (1999); Bernard Plossu’s poetic wanderings between Carloforte and La Maddalena (2002); Ralph Gibson’s ironic reimagining of the nude (1986); and Massimo Vitali’s striking documentation of the tourist presence on beaches such as Poetto (1995) collectively introduce the viewer to the exhibition and to a new century.
Divided into monographic rooms, the exhibition at the MAN in Nuoro presents photographers who interpret contemporary life through a range of thematic lenses. These include the enduring role of masks in ancient traditions and rituals, revisited by Salvatore Ligios (2007) to explore questions of identity and the erosion of local culture, and by Charles Fréger (2010–2011); the eternal – and often futile – anticipation of social, cultural and economic renewal, exemplified by the inauguration of architectural structures for the aborted G8 summit in La Maddalena (Giovanna Silva, 2009); and the dialogue between past and present in the Monument to Garibaldi and the granite fortifications on Caprera island (Paola De Pietri, 2022). Practices of interaction and participation between art and community emerge in the exploration of diverse notions of citizenship, as seen in the works of Marinella Senatore (2013), Vanessa Winship and George Georgiou (2014). Meanwhile, Jacopo Benassi (2021) and Lorenzo Vitturi (2022) address the concept of isolation through their respective projects in Donori and Valle della Luna.
At the Cagliari venue, four photographers united by a shared interest in the interplay between photography and literature offer further interpretations and formal articulations of themes such as interpersonal relationships. Their work engages with the narratives of Sergio Atzeni; the previously unpublished project by Arianna Arcara (2025); and Karla Hiraldo Voleau’s exploration of Generation Z, reimagined through the lens of Pasolini’s legacy of Comizi d’amore (2023). Meanwhile, Luca Spano’s world-building (2020–2021), positioned between imagination and documentation, draws inspiration from the literary journey of D. H. Lawrence. The theme of travel and a renewed interpretation of the territory is explored in the work of François-Xavier Gbré, whose images reveal the evolving social and economic landscape shaped by migration and its far-reaching consequences.
The exhibition presents works of extraordinary visual quality and offers new perspectives on familiar places, opening up a range of reflections on the many themes raised by the works on display. It is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue published by Interlinea, containing a dialogue between the two curators, reproductions of the works on display and biographical and critical notes on the artists included in the exhibition project.

Galleria comunale d’arte di Cagliari
Largo Giuseppe Dessì | Viale San Vincenzo 2 – 09123
Tel. +39.070.6776454
Opening times: 10:00 – 20:00
(closed on Mondays)
museicivici@comune.cagliari.it

MAN_Museo d’arte provincia di Nuoro
Via Sebastiano Satta 27 – 08100 Nuoro
Tel. +39.0784.252110
Opening times: 10:00 – 20:00
(closed on Mondays)
info@museoman.it

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

ISLANDS AND IDOLS
2025-06-27 - 2025-11-16
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

ISCRA | Cultural Fleet of the Mediterranean.
2025-06-27 - 2025-09-07
Integrated Project Between MAN, “Mario Sironi” Academy of Fine Arts of Sassari, and the Marco Magnani Association
At the MAN Museum in Nuoro, an exhibition-restitution opens, the result of an extensive cultural project that brought together various cultural institutions for over a year of research, focusing on the enhancement of a rich and complex territory like Planargia. Located in the historical region of central-western Sardinia, Planargia lies between the Temo river valley—Sardinia’s only navigable river—and the northern slope of Montiferru, the island’s largest volcanic complex. The landscape of Planargia stretches from towering cliffs over the sea to the high plains inland, offering a vast, green panorama dotted with forests, waterfalls, basalt quarries, and fields of asphodel.
The ISCRA_Flotta culturale del Mediterraneo project was conceived by artist Leonardo Boscani and formalized through a multi-party agreement signed by the MAN Museum of Nuoro, the Academy of Fine Arts “Mario Sironi” of Sassari, the Union of Municipalities of Planargia, the Municipality of Flussio, the Marco Magnani Association, the Cosinzu de Isciareu Association of Flussio, and the Ecomuseum of the Sea and Water of Sassari; all with the contribution and support of the Fondazione Sardegna.
Led by Leonardo Boscani, a fleet of artists—including the Check Point Charly collective, with Giorgio Porcheddu, Lucia Magnifico, Marco Facchetti, sound engineer and musician Alfredo Puglia, and stone craftsman and artist Carmelo Logias—along with professors and students from the Academy of Sassari, explored the territory of Planargia on a journey from coast to sea, translating it into works that blend aesthetic languages and anthropological reflections. The project includes art prints and documentation of traditional heritage (e.g., the processing of asphodel, “the gold of Flussio”), experimental photography, acoustic traces, and symbolic mapping of the relationship between nature and society, sculpture, and exploration of the region’s geosites (such as the valorization of Suni’s basaltic and columnar stones).
From sailing along the coast to delving into the geological site of Suni, from collecting asphodel to exploring the railway connecting Bosa to Macomer, the exhibition presents a long journey through images—a narrative “interspace” that, despite diverse languages, converges in the shared commitment to listen, understand, and return the profound character of the place, its identity, and its emergent qualities.
The navigation imagery, based on sailing routes, serves as the backdrop for the imposing presence of a three-meter-tall, seven-ton basalt column with a polygonal base, symbolically laid out like an ancient sundial. This archaic monolith, a giant stone relic, carries the effusive volcanic memory of Planargia and, through a QRCode engraving, provides access to a contemporary storytelling dimension, maps of explorations conducted during the project, and visions of a landscape preserved for future generations in its history and nature.
The artistic residency hosted in the village of Flussio tied the artists’ research to the community, which was involved day by day in the process of restitution. While a team of authors, directors, and photographers moved through the territory to find visual inspiration, conduct interviews, and document moments of daily life, students and professors from the Academy—coordinated by professors Giovanni Sanna, Sergio Miali, and Davide Fadda—revisited the ancient practice of asphodel processing and interpreted its formal outcomes, blending them with technical experimentation on the monochrome of Suni stone. This led to the creation of the “Nero di Planargia,” a unique tone of basalt, whose chemical composition was fixed to create a specific “RAL” color code.
The ISCRA project outlines a cultural route that, from the sea to the hills, from ancient gestures to contemporary technologies, draws new horizons for the Mediterranean—not only as a geographical space but as a dynamic metaphor for exchange, mobility, and transformation.
Coordination:MAN Museum, Rita Moro, Alessandro MoniMarco Magnani Association, Rita DeloguEcomuseum of the Sea and Water of SassariTraditional Latin Sailing Association (AVeLa), Piero Ajello
Academy of Fine Arts “Mario Sironi” of Sassari:Professors: Alessandra Brancati, Davide Manca, Nicolas Martino, Cristina Orsatti, Marco Antonio Pani, Alessandro Ponzeletti, Giovanni Sanna, Oscar Solinas, Federico SoroStudents: Adele Abozzi, Matteo Alba, Antonio Cau, Carla Cannas, Claudia Carta, Francesco Cherveddu, Giommaria Chessa, Luciana Yasmina Congiu, Lina Dau, Lino Deligia, Enrico Delrio, Christopher Filippo Dickey, Andrea Doneddu, Alessandra Fiori, Taras Halaburda, Lucia Loria, Antonello Marchesi, Silvia Marcias, Margherita Masia, Gabriel Meli, Giovanni Moretti, Michael Ogana, Alice Patteri, Simona Pes, Rebecca Pilloni, Oscar Piras, Emma Porcu, Federico Satta, Francesco Tetti.
Bilingual ITA/EN Catalogue-Photographic AlbumPublished by Interlinea, curated by Leonardo Boscani and Chiara Gatti,photographs by Daniele Brotzu,critical text by Nicolas Martino.

Gregorio Botta_Silence is so accurate
2025-03-21 - 2025-06-15 | MAN, Via Sebastiano Satta 27, Nuoro, NU, 08100, Italia
curated by Chiara Gatti and Elisabetta Masala

with a critical text by Davide Ferri

In the beginning, there was light.
But also water and fire, wax and lead, all shaped by time and the elements. In the work of the Neapolitan artist (born in 1953), the ancient power of these elements engages in dialogue with classical iconographies, exploring themes of the sacred and the unseen
For the MAN in Nuoro, Gregorio Botta has created a new project that, drawing on his research into balance and silence, distils abstract forms within space, creating an interplay of reflections and transparencies in the material, pure geometries, raindrops, streams of water and staves punctuated by minimal shapes.
The exhibition title, Silence is so accurate, inspired by a quote from Mark Rothko, embarks on a journey where the precision of the drawing defines distant horizons and traces the passage of time through the circuits and mechanisms of small, solitary machines, as Duchamp might have described them. These absurd machines, lacking specific function, are poetic in their orchestration of movement in a vacuum, producing sounds, vapours or free-flowing writing in space.
When iron and glass, alabaster and dried flowers come together, they create intimate landscapes, enclosed architectures, and references to everyday iconography – objects, symbols and allegories of a life stitched onto waxed paper, which is consumed, worn, and transfigured in anticipation. Epiphanies and disappearances, secrets and subtle revelations, all reflect Botta’s commitment to “an art of removal, of little, of less, with the hope of reaching an art of nothing. An art that disappears, leaving only, like a vibration, like a hidden motor, the very action for which it was created.”
The imprint serves as a trace of legacy in the Pompei series, while the weight of the smoke represents the enduring presence of matter in the work that lends the exhibition its title.
Melted wax, shaped into archetypal forms, evokes Morandi-like patterns on a crystal plane that stretches infinitely in the Orizzonti cycle, where the timeless theme of the threshold carries with it the rich literary tradition exploring the boundary between the visible and the invisible, between the contingent and the immaterial.

Biography

Gregorio Botta
Gregorio Botta was born in Naples on 18 April 1953. In 1980 he enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, where he attended the courses taught by Toti Scialoja, graduating in 1984.
After his debut, during which he participated in several exhibitions at the Galleria Rondanini and had his first solo exhibitions at the Galleria Il Segno, both in Rome, he attracted the attention of critics on the occasion of important exhibitions, including Trasparenze dell’arte italiana sulla via della seta (Transparencies of Italian Art on the Silk Road) curated by Achille Bonito Oliva, held in Beijing in 1993, the XII Quadriennale and the Biennale dei Parchi at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, held in 1996 and 1998 respectively, as well as the solo exhibition, also in 1998, presented by Ludovico Pratesi at the Italian Cultural Institute in Cologne. In 2006 he presented a selection of works at the Magazzini del Sale in Siena in which particular elements of his language reappear in a unique interplay of contrasts: the lightness and transparency of glass, the opacity and hardness of iron. The introduction of movement is unprecedented, animating installations such as La Porta di Pietro, inspired by Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto.
His solo exhibitions have included: Fondazione VOLUME!, Rome (2024, 2009); Galleria Peola Simondi, Turin (2023, 2020); Galleria Studio G7, Bologna (2021), Galleria Nazionale d’arte moderna, Rome (2020); Cripta Borromini in San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, Rome (2019); Francesca Antonini Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2017); MAC — Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago de Chile (2016); MAC — Museum of Contemporary Art, Lima, Peru (2016); Centro d’arte contemporanea Pescheria, Pesaro (2016); Milan Triennale (2015); Forte di Bard, Aosta (2014); Palazzo Te, Mantua (2014), MACRO, Rome (2012); Magazzini del Sale, Siena (2006); Certosa di Padula, Salerno (2005); Vanvitelli underground station, Naples (2005); Galleria Lo Scudo, Verona (2001); Italian Cultural Institute, Cologne (1998). He designed the sets for three shows by Sergio Rubini: Delitto e Castigo, Dracula and Il caso Jekyll. A writer and essayist, his work has been published by Einaudi (2020) Pollock e Rothko, il gesto e il respiro and by Laterza (2022) Paul Klee, genio e regolatezza.

GIOVANNI PINTORI (1912–1999). Advertising as art
2025-03-21 - 2025-06-15
curated by Chiara Gatti and Nicoletta Ossanna Cavadini
coordinated by Rita Moro
joint project with m.a.x. museo, Chiasso
The MAN in Nuoro presents a monographic exhibition celebrating Giovanni Pintori, a master of Italian and international graphic design. Renowned for shaping Olivetti’s iconic visual identity, Pintori stands as a pivotal figure in the field. This exhibition is part of the museum’s ongoing research showcasing Sardinian-born artists who have made a lasting impact on the global art scene.
The MAN in Nuoro, in collaboration with the m.a.x. museo in Chiasso – its partner in a joint project to promote the artist – delves into Giovanni Pintori’s work through an extensive “graphic story”. This exhibition highlights the modernity of his visual language and the brilliance of his creative choices.
Three hundred works, including drawings and paintings, original sketches, scale models, magazine advertisements, photographs and posters, span fifty years of activity recognised by the world’s most prestigious cultural institutions: from the Palma d’Oro of the Federazione Italiana di Pubblicità (1950) to the prestigious exhibition at the MoMA in New York (1952) – in whose garden Pintori built an iron advertising sculpture –, from the exhibition at the Louvre in Paris (1955) to the certificate of excellence from the American Institute of Graphic Arts (1955), from the Medaglia d’Oro at the Fiera Internazionale di Milano (1956) to the Eight Annual Typographic Excellence Award from the Type Directors Club of New York (1962). During the first meeting of the newly formed AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale), Pintori was nominated as a member and then became the Italian president of the same award, while the famous Japanese magazine Idea included him on the list of the thirty most significant designers of the 20th century, thus testifying to his talent and his success worldwide.
A true genius of advertising graphics, Pintori was commissioned by the forward-thinking captain of industry Adriano Olivetti to promote his company and its legendary products all over the world, from the Studio 44 to the very popular Lettera 22. He succeeded admirably in uniting form and content in every single image. Light, colour, composition and creative play define Pintori’s artistic exploration, elevating his graphics as “a metaphorical unicum of communication,” as noted by renowned American designer Paul Rand, the creator of the IBM logo. The rapid tapping of fingers on typewriter keys, letters springing to life, and the inner mechanisms of calculators reimagined as dynamic, playful motifs – these are the hallmarks of Pintori’s visual language. His work embodies a true art of writing, distinguished by elegance and a touch of irony.
“Graphics is not underpainting,” Pintori would say to those who questioned his visual language – the only one, as his friend, poet Vittorio Sereni, observed, capable of “liberating the latent resources contained in the object or product that … is proposed.”
The exhibition looks back over the artist’s creative and professional journey, illustrating the creative process behind the projects that have characterised his remarkable career, ranging from the creation of posters to playbills, corporate identities and company logos.
Biography
Giovanni Pintori was born in 1912 in Tresnuraghes (Oristano), to parents originally from Nuoro, where the family lived from 1918 onwards. After attending the ISIA (Higher Institute of Artistic Industries in Monza) together with fellow Sardinians Salvatore Fancello and Costantino Nivola, in 1936 he began working with the Olivetti Technical Advertising Department, becoming its manager in 1940 and linking his name to the image of the Ivrea-based company through a long and successful series of posters, advertising pages, outdoor signs and exhibition stands. In 1950 he received the first of many accolades: the Palma d’Oro from the Federazione Italiana Pubblicità. This was also the year he became Art Director of Olivetti, earning the esteem of Adriano Olivetti, with whom he had a direct relationship. In 1952 the MoMA in New York staged the exhibition Olivetti: Design in Industry which also included Pintori’s graphic works. In 1953 he joined the AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale) of which he later became president. In 1955, during the exhibition at the Louvre in Paris, an entire room was devoted to his graphics for Olivetti. Also in 1955 he was awarded the Certificate of Excellence in the Graphic Arts by the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) and, the following year, the Medaglia d’Oro and the Diploma di Primo Premio from Linea Grafica and Fiera di Milano. In 1957 he was awarded the Diploma di Gran Premio at the 11th Milan Triennale and participated in the annual AGI exhibition in London. His images accompanied numerous articles about the Olivetti company, while his design and communication work travelled around the world, appearing in magazines such as Fortune (USA, 1953, 1957), Graphic Design (Japan, 1967) and Horizon (USA, 1969). In 1962 (two years after the death of Adriano Olivetti), Pintori received another prestigious international award: the Typographic Excellence Award from the Type Directors Club of New York, followed, in 1964, by the Certificate of Merit from the Art Directors Club of New York. In 1966 a large solo exhibition of his work was held in Tokyo. After 1967, he left Olivetti to set up on his own, working on projects for Pirelli, Gabbianelli, Ambrosetti and Parchi Liguria, among others. In 1981 he began working with the transport company Merzario, creating the graphics for their annual reports and advertising. Following this experience he left his job as a graphic designer and devoted himself entirely to painting. Giovanni Pintori passed away in Milan on 15 November 1999, leaving behind a rich documentary archive, an invaluable resource for studying industrial advertising graphics spanning five decades, from the 1930s to the 1980s.
His family donated part of the archive to the MAN_Museo d’Arte Provincia di Nuoro and a substantial portion is now on loan. The exhibition draws inspiration from this rich legacy, focusing particularly on materials from Pintori’s private archive – sketches, drawings, paintings and photographs – that offer a deeper insight into his passions, shared with fellow artists and art enthusiasts, through an innovative critical interpretation.
Joint project with m.a.x. museo, Chiasso
The m.a.x. museo, which opened on 12 November 2005 on the initiative of the Fondazione Max Huber–Kono in Chiasso, became a public institution run by the Comune di Chiasso in 2010 and is a member of ICOM (International Council of Museums). The mission of the m.a.x. museo is to promote an understanding of contemporary graphics, design, photography and visual communication. The term “graphics” refers to the field of artistic production focused on the design and creation of visual communication materials, particularly graphic design and art graphics (or historical graphics). The m.a.x. museo aims to bridge the gap between the past and the new generations of graphic artists and designers. Situated near the Cinema Teatro and the Spazio Officina, the museum’s location fosters a connection between the border town’s key cultural institutions and has also contributed to the development of the new and vital Centro Culturale Chiasso, renowned for its international exhibitions and theatrical productions. On 3 April 2019, the Centro Culturale Chiasso received a prestigious award in Zug from the Swiss Foundation for the Doron Prize. The prize, delivered with a presentation speech by Isabelle Chassot, director of the Federal Office of Culture (FOC), was awarded for the “excellent cultural offering” promoted by the border town

set-up by Stand Up, Cagliari
catalogue published by Silvana Editoriale
with texts by Chiara Gatti, Nicoletta Osanna Cavadini, Mario Piazza, Davide Cadeddu, Luigi Sansone, Angela Madesani

Alessandro Biggio. Filira
2024-11-22 - 2025-03-09
curated by Chiara Gatti with an essay by Caterina Riva
The Cagliari-born artist presents an unprecedented project, Filira (Phillyrea), showcasing a new series of works in an exhibit designed as an all-embracing environment where canvases and sculptures are connected to each other in a systematic and all the same unitary overall vision. Known for his exploration of ash generated by the combustion of plants from his garden in Calasetta, which he turns into a plastic medium to create sculptures characterised by a fragile appearance, Biggio has recently experimented with a form of painting using the juice of phillyrea berries that he squeezes to produce a dark ochre colour with purple nuances. Just as his series of ash sculptures is the result of an authentic reflection on the cycle of life and the elements, the medium of painting transcribes imprints of nature, in its metamorphosis and consumption.
Lingering in the background is the reference to a Greek myth: the nymph Philyra (Filira), daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, was loved by Chronos from whom she tried to escape by transforming herself into a mare. But Chronos, transforming himself into a stallion, reached her and raped her. Philyra gave birth to a son, a hybrid creature, the centaur Chiron. Shocked at the sight of her son, she asked Zeus to be transformed into a shrub that would take her name, phillyrea. With the extract of the berries of this plant, Biggio uses the canvas to trace the vestiges of an ephemeral vegetation.
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A Biggio_portrait_ph Barbara Pau
Alessandro Biggio

(Cagliari, 1975), lives and works in Cagliari and Calasetta. He graduated in economics and now dedicates himself to aesthetic research. In his artistic practice, the process of exploration and experimentation on matter plays a fundamental role. His sculptures, installations, and monotypes are always the result of layered gestures and phases, whose final result represents a possible moment of balance, between control and loss of control over the process, between decay and form. His participation in solo and group exhibitions in public and private spaces includes: Gherdëina Contemporary Art Biennale, Museo MAN of Nuoro, Fondazione di Sardegna, Museo Marino Marini in Florence, Gallerie d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea of Cagliari, Galerie Stadtpark Krems, GAMeC in Bergamo, CLER in Milan, Fondazione Bartoli-Felter in Cagliari. In 2020, he was awarded the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.

Una Szeemann. Scenafenomenica
2024-11-22 - 2025-03-09
curated by Elisabetta Masala with an essay by Juliette Desorgues
Magic and mythology, classical traditions and archaic culture merge in the exploration advanced by the Swiss artist, who experiments with materials imbued with strong expressive value, giving life to a choral narrative relying on epic nuances.
Divinities of the earth and the night, arcane symbols, the beneficial properties of the plants and an ancient wisdom engulf Una Szeemann’s works with mystery and primordial memories, as the wild sentiment of the woods takes shape through highly suggestive abstract forms.
The project designed for the MAN is tied to the land of Sardinia, its harsh surroundings, the folktale of Janas, and the archaeological remnants in its landscape, where nature seems to fossilise, and blend with the rocks and peaks of Supramonte.

Una Szeemann – Courtesy dell’artista
Una Szeemann (Locarno, Switzerland, 1975) lives and works in Zürich and Tegna. She studied drama in Milan. Her works were showcased at several international exhibitions, including Kunsthaus Zürich, Kunsthalle Winterthur, Museo Cantonale d’Arte in Lugano, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Kunstverein Hamburg, Belvedere 21 in Vienna, Venice Art Biennale, Busan Biennale, Lyon Biennale, and Manifesta 11 in Zürich. She lectures at several institutions and universities, including the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK) and the Haute École d’Art et de Design in Geneva (HEAD).

Christiane Löhr. Accumuli
2024-11-22 - 2025-03-09
curated by Chiara Gatti with an essay by Bruno Corà – from November 22 to March 9, 2025.
Architectures of nature. Domes of seeds and cathedrals of blades of grass. A large installation by the German-born artist, Tuscan by adoption, dots the first floor of the museum with diaphanous, almost impalpable sculptures; an ode to the ethereality of nature and, all the same, to its complexity.

The talented and masterful hands of Christiane Löhr create sculptures made of dandelions, stems, pods, or horsehair and hoist tapered arboreal structures up into the space, edifying minimalist landscapes.
Small temples consisting of a plethora of abstract forms are enriched for this occasion with a special tribute to Sardinia: tiny piles of grains or seeds conjure towers and Nuragic constructions. In Löhr’s exploration, natural inspiration is not a mere explanation of the vegetation and its species, though. Her reflection raises matter to a dimension of radical abstraction and absolute form, where paramount importance is attributed to balance and proportion between the elements, sense of the space and value of the void. The exhibition also features a selection of pastel, graphite, and ink drawings on paper; the fruit of a similar sculptural process, in which the fibres of paper are rubbed and scratched as if it were plastic.

Portrait Christiane Löhr / Foto Salvatore Mazza
Christiane Löhr, (Wiesbaden, Germany, 1965) lives and works in Prato and Cologne. She graduated from the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf with Jannis Kounellis in 1994; under his supervision, she completed her Master of Arts in 1996. Her works were exhibited in several venues and art centres: Chaumont-sur-Loire, Haus am Waldsee, Museo e Real Bosco in Capodimonte, Museo San Fedele in Milan, Wuppertal, Kunsthaus Baselland, Muttenz, MART in Rovereto, Villa Panza in Varese, Centro Pecci in Prato. In 2001, she exhibited at the 49th Venice Art Biennale curated by Harald Szeemann and, in 2016, she was awarded the Premio Pino Pascali.

El Greco. Dialogue Between Two Masterpieces
2024-11-22 - 2025-03-09
In collaboration with the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca, Rome and Musei Civici di Reggio Emilia
Following the success of the exhibition dedicated to the ideal dialogue between Giotto and Lucio Fontana, centered on gold and its symbolism, the MAN Museum presents a new, original project for Christmas 2024. This exhibition will explore the dialogue between two masterpieces by El Greco, born Domínikos Theotokópoulos (1541–1614), the renowned master of Spain’s Golden Age. El Greco is famous for his elongated forms, luminescent tones, and the intense rhythm of lines and gestures on canvas.
Dubbed the “Delacroix of the Renaissance” and the “Nabi of beautiful icons,” and admired by Cézanne and Picasso—who proclaimed his debt with the phrase, “Yo soy El Greco!”—El Greco stands as one of the greatest figures of late Renaissance European painting.
Born in Crete in the first half of the sixteenth century, then part of the Republic of Venice, he moved to Venice in 1567.
In search of a new way of painting, a dynamic dimension that departed from the two-dimensional, abstract, and static universe of Eastern tradition, he worked in the workshop of the elderly Titian. From him, he learned the expressive use of color: vibrant, intense, thick, luminous, and spiritual. In Venice, he was struck by the sense of movement and the dramatic use of light by Tintoretto. From Jacopo Bassano, he absorbed the formal elements of pictorial narration, the use of perspective, and architectural backgrounds.
After a brief and tumultuous stay in Rome as a guest of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, he moved to Toledo, dreaming of winning the favor of King Felipe II and being appointed the official painter of the cathedral. Although he did not achieve this honor, he found prestigious commissions in the Spanish city that allowed him to develop his vibrant pictorial language, characterized by sudden bursts of light and bold twists of fluid bodies, which impart a keen expression of their feelings and the movements of the soul.
The MAN, thanks to a collaborative agreement with the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca in Rome, presents the recent discovery of a masterpiece by El Greco, The Adoration of the Magi. This work remained unknown for centuries and has only recently been attributed to the Cretan genius, thanks to a careful restoration and a scientific study campaign that has unveiled its troubled history. A documentary film produced by the MAN and directed by Stefano Conca Bonizzoni, featuring contributions from Claudio Strinati, Fabrizio Biferali, and Fabio Porzio, introduces visitors to the exhibition, which also includes a second masterpiece, The Blessing Christ from the Civic Museums of Reggio Emilia, returning from an important retrospective of the master at the Royal Palace of Milan.

Diorama. Generation Earth
2024-07-05 - 2024-11-10
curated by Chiara Gatti, Elisabetta Masala
in collaboration with Storyville
with texts in the catalogue by Felice Cimatti and Fabio Merlini
The MAN of Nuoro announces a major exhibition for the summer that will transform all the rooms of the museum into a dynamic and sensitive space, made up of narratives and visions, memories of the earth and new horizons. The MAN, how a gigantic diorama – boxed illusion of a realistic world, device used above all in natural history museums to illustrate the environments of the biosphere – will return to offer the public an experience of “crossing” the museum, already tested in 2022 with the exhibition SENSORAMA , questioning ourselves once again on current issues. Derived from Greek say ( through) e òrama ( vision), DIORAMA means “to see through” or “into something.” In this case, through cross-sections of natural and unnatural worlds, populated with real or recreated creatures and vegetation, in a perspective that makes the limit between authentic or generated by artificial intelligence, possible or impossible, increasingly ambiguous.
In a period marked by unprecedented ecological and social changes, with impacts that extend across time and space, it is important to reconsider our relationship with the world and its rapid metamorphoses. We are faced with a global ecological transformation that requires a profound reflection on the condition of the human being, on the history of the earth, and our connection with other living creatures. Rethinking our relationship with the planet implies the research of new languages and new forms of communication, which are essential for renewing connections between the human and non-human world. DIORAMA – Generation Earth stems from the belief that we must take an active role in this reinvention process. The idea of being the first generation to tackle the realistic possibility of the extinction of the human species engenders a strong feeling of anxiety. Starting from this sense of disconcertment, DIORAMA explores the current scenario, without claiming to offer an exhaustive analytical investigation, putting forward possible visions that take into account these compelling issues.
Through an array of works including paintings and sculptures, installations and videos, selected Italian and international artists advance sweeping interpretations, from mimetic creativity to post-natural prospects, from interspecific hybridisation to taxidermy and wonder-rooms, from the invention of natural landscapes to unexplored visions of generative intelligence. Through the works on display, DIORAMA – Generation Earth wants to stir critical dialogue and reflection on our standpoint within the biosphere and prompt a renewed relationship with it. The artists therefore become catalysts of a radical change thanks to their ability to see beyond the visible and invite the audience to lay the foundations for a different imagery that may lead us toward an inclusive future that respects all forms of life.
Christiane Löhr (Wiesbaden, 1965) Kleine Gräserkuppel / Little Grass Dome, 2021 Grass stalks

Exhibition path
“The origin” is the prologue of the exhibition: the creation of planet Earth and the galaxy. Visitors will witness the spectacle of the genesis of that amalgam composed of matter and dark energy. Underpinning the exhibit are key words such as organic and inorganic, nature/art and its transformations: across the museum halls, female and male artists take possession of ‘nature’, enclosing it within their system/content that imitates it while conserving and reimagining it.
Like one greenhouse production, the natural world is recreated and imitated. Mimesis and representation animate the works of Barragão , Kusumoto , Roberti , Illenberger , Bauer . The natural world, fixed in a sculptural form or sealed in the circuit of the fabric, re-proposed by the sensitivity of man or by artificial intelligence, acquires an unusual dynamism and a new reality.
Vanessa Barragão (Albufeira, 1992)Portrait of Vanessa Barragão: recycling in textile art as a global manifesto, 2019Textile fibre, yarn, crochet and hand weavingDHG, Prato
Hybridisations, interspeciesism, and eco-dystopia are the scenarios of a near future displayed in the section reserved to alien ecosystems, the upshots of post-naturalism, the encounters with an otherness that requires reconsidering an anthropocentric perspective. A tunnel of light evokes a laboratory for hybrid creatures (by Massoulier, Grünfeld, Chiamenti) and culminates with a large work by Wangechi Mutu representing a fluid Mother Earth towering over the universe in which alien and terrestrial creatures blend, without distinctions between male and female, human beings, animals and plants; a jubilee of the term ‘intertwined’: living beings that belong to a world that does not envisage divisions between races, genders, and species.
Artists:

Vanessa Barragão , Massimo Bartolini, Susanna Bauer , Alessandro Biggio, Eelco Brand , Julia Carrillo , Giovanni Chiamenti , Elisabetta Di Maggio , Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg , Thomas Grünfeld , Sarah Illenberger , Georges Koutsouris , Mariko Kusumoto , Chiara Lecca , Christiane Löhr , Théo Massoulier , Wangechi Mutu, Daniela Novello , Francesco Panozzo, Marta Roberti , Giuliana Rosso, Kiki Smith , Ketty Tagliatti, Thomas Thwaites , Luca Trevisani , Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel .

Valentina Medda_THE LAST LAMENTATION
2024-03-28 - 2024-06-16 | MAN, Via Sebastiano Satta 27, Nuoro, NU, 08100, Italia
THE EXHIBITION

Curated by Maria Paola Zedda
The Last Lamentation it is a funeral ritual for the Mediterranean, observed by the artist as a place of waiting, suspension and passing, embodiment of an absence – a deposit of bodies and the body in itself.
Valentina Medda crosses it in the evocation of a rite widespread throughout the area overlooking its coasts: the ritual crying, investigated at the end of the 1950s by the anthropologist Ernesto De Martino, now almost extinct in Southern Italy, but living on the southern and eastern coasts from Lebanon to Morocco.
The exhibition revolves around the video work of the same name The Last Lamentation, produced between 2023 and 2024, destined for the collections of the MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art of Bologna: a work shot in Sardinia and created through a research journey in the territory, which tells the tragedy of the sea through a hypnotic choreographic score , vocal, sound.
The work reworks ritual codes in contemporary and abstract forms thanks to the collaboration with Gaspare Sammartano, composer, Claudia Ciceroni, composer and vocal trainer, Attila Faravelli, for aspects related to field recording.
Here the relationship between body, pathos, landscape is stratified by systems of absence and presence through the participation of a choir of 12 women dressed in black, standing next to the sea, an element which by contrast makes the silent presence of the dead more tangible and makes explode their voices.
The exhibition also brings together a corpus of works, many of which are exhibited for the first time, which the artist created already in the early stages of his study and which converge around the video work, retracing the moments of its elaboration: collage, inks on paper, photographs, drawings and some sculptural elements.
Since 2018 Valentina Medda has been carrying out research on the Mediterranean, which initially led her to work in Beirut in residence at the Beirut Art Residency. We find traces of this experience in the collages present in the exhibition, which make up a texture that is knotted around an original territory, Sardinia – the artist’s homeland – to then reconnect with the Mediterranean.
Together with the collages, the evocation of the handkerchiefs that accompany the crying ritual inspired by Cecilia Mangini’s documentary on the Apulian tradition, crystallize in the process of solidification through the firing of the ceramic, which burns the soul of the internal fabric leaving a void in the sculpture , an absence. To complete the restitution of Medda’s research, an artist’s notebook visually collects the scenes in a poetic storyboard. Images of the sea and some polaroids worked as if this water became skin, translate a visual horizon, which is both liquid and corporeal.
The project is presented by ZEIT (leader), in partnership with MAN Museum of Art Province of Nuoro , Sardinia Theatre , Arts Center 404 / VierNulVier (Ghent, BE) e Flux Factory (New York) in collaboration with the Sardinia Film Commission Foundation and supported by ARS – Shared Art in Sardinia for the Foundation of Sardinia (project sponsor). The cultural partners are Careof , BIG Bari International Gender Festival , RAMDOM , Alchemilla .
The artist is supported by the European Large-Scale Network Stronger Peripheries – A Southern Coalition thanks to the support of Sardinia Theatre , Bunker Ljubljana , The Mondaino Arboretum .
“ The work is conceived as a funeral ritual for the sea ” – declares the artist Valentina Medda – “a participatory performance inspired by the tradition of funeral laments in which a group of women dressed in black give life to a shared cry, a ritual that looks to the choir as the only possible language to tell a contemporary tragedy. In crying for the Mediterranean and its dead – continues the artist – the attempt is to give voice and body back through poetic and political action to those lives considered expendable, those that do not even deserve mourning, as the philosopher Judith Butler states. The sea here is an extension of the body, which loses its boundaries and becomes liquid, an aqueous creature. The question of where the body ends and where space begins has shaped, in fact, all my research over the last 10 years, through different languages ​​and in different ways, questioning the distinction between the physicality of the individual and external materiality. in an attempt to create an embodied geography and imagine new hybrid bodies, finding the thread that binds all vibrant materials, living and non-living”.

VALENTINA MEDDA

Biography
Valentina Medda is a Sardinian interdisciplinary artist who lives in Bologna. He studied photography at the ICP – International Center of Photography in New York. His artistic practice unfolds between image, performance and site-specific interventions, investigating the relationship between public and private, body and architecture, city and social belonging. His work has been exhibited and tours in national and international artistic and performance contexts from Bologna, Milan, Cagliari to Paris, New York, Beirut, Brussels and Amsterdam.
She was artist in residence at Couvent de Recollets, Paris; BAR, Beirut; Cité des Arts, Paris; Flux Factory, NY; Les bains connective, Brussels; MaisonVentidue, Bologna. In 2019 she was invited to the Grand Tour d’Italie, an international networking project of the Contemporary General Directorate of the Ministry of Culture. He has received, among others, the Cimetta Fund for artistic mobility, Movin up of the Emilia Romagna Region, IAP Mentorship of the NYFA – New York Foundation for Arts and Tina Art PRIZE. His project Cities by Night Across Borders was selected among the 19 winners of the European program “Perform Europe”.
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Micol Roubini _The Magic Mountain
2024-03-28 00:00 - 2024-06-16 00:00 (Europe/Rome) | MAN, Via Sebastiano Satta 27, Nuoro, NU, 08100, Italia
The project is carried out thanks to the support of the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture as part of the 11th edition of the Italian Council (2022); promoted and produced by Lo scuola dell’arte, with the contribution of nctm and l’arte. The work will become part of the MAN collection in Nuoro.

THE EXHIBITION

MAN presents the exhibition The Magic Mountain by Micol Roubini, centered on a work that takes the form of a video installation of environmental dimensions and which will occupy the rooms on the first floor of the museum.
The project The Magic Mountain was born from the meeting of Micol Roubini with the Corio and Balangero area.
Always interested in the memorial traces of places and people, and involved in long-term projects in the area, the artist recounts the phase post industrial analyzing the dense network of relationships that, with the context, entertain the inhabitants.
We are, in fact, in Northern Italy, a few tens of kilometers from Turin: a densely populated area. Yet a suspended atmosphere dominates in the towns of Corio and Balangero and in the adjacent disused asbestos quarry.
Active from 1918 to 1990, Amiantifera was the largest open-air quarry in Europe. Today the area is at the center of an extensive reclamation project; the still legible signs of extractive activity coexist with the traces of a progressive growing wild, with the reappearance, both natural and induced, of various plant and animal species.
In the video installation The Magic Mountain different levels are intertwined including the process of colonization of contaminated land by plants and lichens, laboratory research on asbestos, the suggestions at the origin of the very history of the use of the mineral, considered since ancient times magical for its extraordinary fire-retardant properties.
The ongoing transition phase pits a recent past marked by some of the most complex events in Italian industrial history against a future reconversion aimed at returning large areas of the mountain, currently inaccessible, to the communities that surround it.
Among Roubini’s research trajectories, one concerned the dreamlike imagination of the inhabitants of the area, mostly former mine workers or their family members; a way to investigate their internal experience with respect to the complexity of the situation.
The magic mountain it is a video installation, 4 channels, 2023, super 16mm transferred to 2K, sound, 24’30”.

MICOL ROUBINI

She was born in 1982 in Milan, where she lives and works. She graduated from the Brera Academy and the Univeristät der Künste in Berlin. Since 2021 he has been teaching New Languages ​​of Visual Communication at CFP Bauer, Milan. His research investigates the balance between man and territory, between cultural systems and landscape morphology, between history, migrations and individual memories.
He has exhibited at Museo Casa Testori (2021), Premio Matteo Oliviero (2017), Hotel Charleroi (2013). He carried out the project Clandestine deeds for movable lands (Palazzo Magnani Foundation 2021). He has participated in video exhibitions at Villa Medici (2021), Pavilion (Poznan 2021), LightCone (Paris 2017), Scotland’s Center for Photography (2012).
He has conducted masterclasses (Locarno Film Festival 2022) and participated in residencies including Fondazione Pistoletto (2017), Scottish Sculpture Workshop (2013). His movie The road to the mountains (2019), in competition at Cinema du Réel and at other European festivals, it won the Corso Salani Award at the Trieste Film Festival 2020.

GABI SCARDI

She is a curator and critic of contemporary art, for years involved in public projects and social practices. She is the curator of solo exhibitions, group exhibitions and public projects. He collaborates with Italian and international artistic and cultural institutions, including: Pac, Milan; Museo del Novecento, Milan; Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milan; MAXXI, Rome; Venice Biennale, Venice; Royal Academy, London; Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen.
Among the projects curated: Chiaralice Rizzi and Alessandro Laita, The Memory of the Air, winning project of the Italian Council, Marubi Museum, Scutari, Albania, 2021-2022; Emilio Fantin, Awakenings, winning project of the Italian Council, Mambo Bologna, Palazzo Barolo Turin, Baruchello Foundation Rome, University of Chicago; Maria Papadimitriou, Why look at animals AGRIMIKA’, Greek Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale; restoration of the Teatro Continuo by Alberto Burri, Milan, 2015.
Since 2011 she has been artistic director of nctm e l’arte.

Credits

film script : Micol Roubini
photography : Davide Maldi
help with photography and camera : Tiziano Doria
editing and color correction : Davide Maldi, Micol Roubini
direct sound : Giovanni Corona
audio editing and mixing : Giancarlo Rutigliano
executive producer : The Altauro
production assistants : Francesca Bennett, Giulio Squarci
technical materials : L’Altauro, Labbash, Warshad Film, Panalight, Nova Rollfilm
film development and printing : Augustus Color
filmed in Kodak super16mm film
with (in order of appearance) :
Caterina Cerva Pedrin, Mario Giacomin Potachin, Marco Picca Piccon, Irene Damiano, Paul Leon Allaire, Gian Carlo Bertellino, Sergio Favero Longo, Gian Mauro Salot, Ivan Cavalli, Martina Sette, Sabrina Scolari, Mariagrazia Luiso
and with :
Roberto Chiesa, Lorenzo degli Espositi, Alessandra degli Espositi, Federica dell’Omo, Daniela Dhampiraj, Sara Ferrando, Bruna Garofoli, Fabrizio Cat Genova, Virginia Coletti Grancia, Roberto Macario, Domenica Mangialardo, Graziella Martini, Raffaele Rudi Mazzotta, Federico Picca Piccon, Renato Quercia, Rosangela Vietti Ramus, Marina Vietti Ramus, Sergio Ruo Ruich, Andrea Telesca
Thank you : RSA srl, University of Turin, Mining Ecomuseum of Balangero Corio and Cudine, Aib Boschivi, Nuova Cava Ceretta, Associazione Ariele, Pro loco Corio, Association of Alta Val Malone paths, Okta Film, Kodak, Osteria di Campagna Cudine, Agriturismo Bastià , Giacu d’Nota
Chiara Allari, Cristina Bagnasco, Claudio Baima Rughet, Luciana Baima Rughet, Guido Battaglia, Roberto Bellezza, Massimo Bergamini, Guido Blanchard, Pierdomenico Bonino, Carol Brentisci, Paola Carini, Franco Carnevale, Arianna Cecconi, Marina Ballo Charmet, Roberta Ciambrone, Marilena Colombaro , Alessandro Costa, Augusta Franco Cavalli, Luciano Dionisi, Bice Fubini, Alfredo Gamba, Antonio Ghione, Samira Guadagnuolo, Maurizio Iacocella, Corrado Magnani, Aldo Mairano, Giuliana Marangoni, Dario Mirabelli, Valentina Molinar Min, Riccardo Lazzarini, Federica Nardese, Elena Nascimbene , Giovanni Poma, Paola Pregnolato, Elisa Pugliaro, Juan Rolando, Ruo Rui, Giancarlo Suino, Giorgio Taccon, Francesco Turci, Enrico Tuvo, Elisa Pugliaro, Gianluigi Soldi, Benedetto Terracini, Piero Zanini, the participants of the Libro Bar di Corio.

Giorgio Andreotta Calò_in girum imus night
2024-03-28 00:00 - 2024-06-16 00:00 | MAN, Via Sebastiano Satta 27, Nuoro, NU, 08100, Italia
The collective memory of Sardinia, its landscape, together with the social and ecological consequences of extraction processes, are at the center of the work conducted on the island by Giorgio Andreotta Calò: an investigation carried out between 2013 and 2018, which led to the creation of a fundamental corpus in the artist’s career.
Today, a part of these works finds an ideal location at the MAN museum thanks to the Contemporary Art Plan of the Ministry of Culture, completing and integrating the previous acquisition of Productive .
In 2019, in fact, the artist donated part of the environmental installation to MAN Productive , composed of core samples extracted during the mining campaigns of Carbosulcis.spa, a company that until 2018 was involved in the exploitation of the Sulcis coal basin, an area in the south-west of the island.
With a procedure similar to geognostic investigations, Giorgio Andreotta Calò analyzes the stratification and identity of the place examining its socio-cultural aspects.
A similar semantic root is shared by the works of the project in girum imus nocte , which testify to a common process of research and interaction with the Sardinian territory and its history.
The title, taken from the Latin palindrome “in girum imus nocte et consumemur igni” (“we walk around at night and are consumed by fire”), alludes to the symbolic charge of the film installation of the same name which, with the sculptures Pinna Nobilis And Dogod, creates a coherent whole in which the individual elements enhance each other’s meanings.
The fulcrum of the installation is the film which documents the march carried out by the artist together with a group of miners and fishermen from Sulcis on the night of 4 December 2014 (the day of Santa Barbara, protector of the mining community).
The journey becomes a ritual in an eschatological perspective that recognizes the social role of workers, accentuating the value of their presence. The ritual march from the mine to the island of Sant’Antioco, from sunset to dawn, is emphasized by the stick that accompanies the journey, which later became an integral part of the work presented in the exhibition.
The use of 16 mm film is, in its fragility, functional to the overall meaning of the story, evoking the alchemical component of transformation of matter that all the works on display have in common.
The metamorphosis of the skull of a creature halfway between dog (Dog) and divinity (God) is at the center of Dogod , whose constituent elements, coming from the Cirdu pond, in Sant’Antioco, were assembled to then create the lost wax casting in white bronze exhibited here. Sculpture also refers to Sulcis Pinna Nobilis , produced from the cast of a specimen of the homonymous bivalve species endemic to the Mediterranean, also recovered in Punta Trettu during the making of the film.
The works on display, among the most emblematic and representative of Giorgio Andreotta Calò’s research, accompany the visitor in depth: into the depths of the earth, but also into the essence of the artist’s method. In this way, landscape and history are assimilated by the works, becoming an essential term.

BIOGRAPHY

Born in Venice in 1979, Giorgio Andreotta Calò lives and works in Venice.
He studied sculpture at the Venice Academy and the Kunsthochschule in Berlin. Between 2008 and 2010 he was artist in residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. In 2011 Calò’s work was presented at the 54th Venice Biennale directed by Bice Curiger. In 2012 he won the Italy Prize for contemporary art promoted by the MAXXI Museum. In 2014 he won the New York Prize, promoted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 2017 he is one of the three artists invited to represent Italy in the Pavilion curated by Cecilia Alemani at 57. International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale. In 2018, with the project Anastasis , wins the Italian Council tender promoted by the Ministry of Culture, for the creation of a monumental installation at the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam. In 2019 a personal exhibition was dedicated to him at Pirelli Hangar Bicocca. His works are part of numerous public and private collections in Italy and abroad.
The project is supported by the PAC 2022-2023 – Plan for Contemporary Art, promoted by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture.

The imagined affinities
2024-03-28 - 2024-06-16 | MAN, Via Sebastiano Satta 27, Nuoro, NU, 08100, Italia
THE EXHIBITION

The collection of the MAN museum in Nuoro, the most important collection, is back on display of modern and contemporary art linked to the history of Sardinia.
From Mario Sironi to Maria Lai, from Francesca Devoto to Giovanni Campus, from Costantino Nivola to Lisetta Carmi. A collective heritage that is rooted in the memory of the place and opens the horizon to the languages ​​of the younger generations.
The MAN museum in Nuoro is pleased to announce The imagined affinities, a large exhibition dedicated to the historical collection that comes out of storage for a reinterpretation and rearrangement project. The path is aimed at the participation of the local community, to activate a reflection on identity issues, but with a sensitive eye to universal perspectives.
From the microhistory to the macrohistory of man: Sardinia, its art, its culture, represent an exemplary case of major facts, a concentration of events that reflect the Italian ones, in a limited but fundamental dimension as a piece of a broad horizon.
From the realism of Antonio Ballero to the divisionism of the former Sironi , from returning to the order of Ciusa Romagna to the bourgeois realism of Francesca Devoto , from the abstractionism of Mauro Manca to the extraordinary lives of Little boy , Nivola And Painters , by the bursting and touching creativity of Maria Lai, up to the research of the latest generations. In this case, site-specific installations created for the museum spaces as part of prizes won thanks to the Ministry’s tenders stand out and where the names of emerging Sardinians alternate with others, called to inhabit and tell the story of the island.
A choice of 100 masterpieces out of a thousand works from the permanent collection punctuate a path rethought in the light of new investigations and in the aftermath of the publication of the catalog published by Officina Libraria with the title “100 Masterpieces from the MAN collection”.
A 360-degree survey of acquisitions, donations and loans allows us to read the connections between subjects and authors, iconographies and variants in a different way.
The installation inspired by a sort of time machine – unlike the classic chronological progression – creates short circuits, comings and goings, flashbacks and leaps into the contemporary – in order to stimulate possible affinities, legacies of style or content in the visitor. The tributes to are important Costantino Nivola (chosen by Adriano Pedrosa, curator of the next Venice Biennale for his exhibition dedicated to exiles around the world) as well as Jorge Eielson (in line with the international celebrations for the centenary of his birth), and to Guido Strazza master of Italian abstraction from the post-war period onwards, linked to Sardinia by his maternal birth and by a strong intellectual friendship with Maria Lai. Strazza donated three monumental works to the MAN, now exhibited for the first time.

Fancello Nivola Pintori
2023-11-24 - 2024-03-04 | MAN, Via Sebastiano Satta 27, Nuoro, NU, 08100, Italia
The project wants to pay homage to the figures of the three artists, Costantino Nivola (Orani, 1911 – Long Island, 1988), Giovanni Pintori (Tresnuraghes, 1912 – Milan, 1999), Salvatore Fancello (Dorgali, 1916 – Bregu Rapit, 1941) at following the celebrations for the 100th anniversary of the foundation of ISIA, through an exhibition itinerary that will take place in the MAN and the Salvatore Fancello Civic Museum of Dorgali.
The two institutions, in a synergistic manner and through an important institutional collaboration, will prepare a series of collateral events aimed at valorising the works of the three ‘Sardinians of ISIA’ and the common training path.
The project boasts, as a further objective, that of strengthening the link between the MAN and local institutions, in this case with Dorgali, the birthplace of Salvatore Fancello, of which the Dorgali museum preserves, among other things, the famous ‘Disegno interrupted’ from 1938, donated by the artist to Costantino Nivola on the occasion of his wedding.
The permanent collection of the MAN houses a precious nucleus of the most representative works of the three artists, starting from the loan of Giovanni Pintori with 160 works, followed by the corpus of works by Salvatore Fancello, including the two sculptures Female Figure and Boars.
In 1931 the three artists won a scholarship from the Chamber of Commerce of Nuoro to attend courses at the ISIA (Higher Institute for Artistic Industries), the famous school created in Monza on the initiative of the Umanitaria of Milan. The institute, active from 1922 to 1943, attracted great personalities from the artistic world from its early years to whom it entrusted the teaching of technical and creative subjects. In fact, architects such as Giuseppe Pagano and Edoardo Persoli, the sculptors Marino Marini and Arturo Martini and the painter Pio Semeghini passed through its classrooms. At the same time, the school revealed itself to be a place of experimentation, study, growth and innovation.
Fancello, Nivola and Pintori collaborated, starting from 1936, with the Olivetti Technical Advertising Office, directed by Renato Zveteremich, a true pioneer of advertising graphics. In the mid-1930s, Pintori and Nivola were the designers of innovative posters and some exemplary publications, which marked the famous “Olivetti style”. Fancello, despite frequenting the Milan offices of the Ivrea company, preferred to dedicate himself to ceramics.
Nivola and Pintori jointly created the posters for the first Olivetti Studio Model 42, of which the exhibition documents all the stages of production and promotion. The Sardinian masters together created poetic and effective images, made of evocative symbols and visual games. Their talent contributed to distinguishing the strong graphic identity of the Italian company in the world. Costantino Nivola, recalling his work in the Advertising Office in those years, wrote “Adriano Olivetti demanded that the entire visual aspect of Olivetti be done on an artistic level”.
To accompany the exhibition itinerary, the project also includes the in-depth study, through archive research, of documents and photographs, including some unpublished ones that have recently emerged in private collections. The exhibition is enriched by a catalog that documents the association of Sardinian masters in the wake of the enlightened and avant-garde spirit of a school that created an era.

THE REST OF DAWN - Pininfarina Architecture and Patrick Tuttofuoco
2023-11-24 - 2024-03-04 | MAN, Via Sebastiano Satta 27, Nuoro, NU, 08100, Italia
Against the backdrop of a year that the MAN of Nuoro has dedicated to the dialogue between art and architecture, after the homage to the Odessa staircase and the workshops with the architecture universities of Cagliari, Alghero and Palermo, a new, specifically designed project is now taking shape for the museum spaces.
The exhibition Il Resto dell’Alba was born from a theoretical comparison between the artist Patrick Tuttofuoco, the museographer curator Maddalena d’Alfonso and the architect Giovanni de Niederhäusern, vice president of Pininfarina Architettura. Il Resto dell’Alba is an enveloping work that interprets the new frontier of the virtual by giving a physical body to digital hypertechnology.
The art space, in fact, is seen as an experiential place generated with virtual prototyping tools, where space and public integrate and activate each other, looking at the time of art: on the one hand the historical, past, ideally represented from a Nuragic sculpture, with all its mythical and absolute implications at the same time, as an eternal sign of an iconic presence of our origins, “where we come from”, our archaic heritage; on the other hand, that of the digital future, the “where we are going” symbolized by the incorporeal and auroral imagery of the epiphanic light of a double sun, a perspective and, at the same time, a new genesis, inspired by the classic iconography of the rising sun, of anarchist origin, hope of a bright future, allegory of regeneration and a new sense of man’s inhabitation on earth, as theorized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Bruno Taut or Martin Heidegger. All this is the basis of a powerful and utopian design form, a work that can be traversed on an allegorical journey, where the experience is sublimated into the dimension of the symbol.
The environment designed with generative parametric design tools is entirely made of aluminum cut with a technique called mesh clustering, to optimize the use of the material, numerical control manufacturing and dry assembly. This will allow, at the end of the exhibition, to dismantle the work and reuse the material in the recycling chain. The double sun is an object-form composed of the incipient sphere and its double, which is also a luminous shadow, an inconceivable short circuit on the question of the source of light and heat. The exhibition, in the dialogue between art, architecture and museography, offers the public a personal experience, in which the dilation of the moment of dawn crystallizes a state of waiting, once suspended and places the observer faced with questions about a future increasingly unnatural but with a view to a virtuous reciprocity between nature and technology. Between past and future, the visitor embodies the present. The museographic landscape taken from the digital imagery of the metaverse makes us perceive the fascination of the discomfort of being too close to the sun. A sensation that generates reflection on major common and current themes, to be addressed with ever greater urgency: from the most obvious, relating to climate change, to those of research on design to support the reduction of waste and on raw materials.
With this exhibition, MAN promotes sharing on fundamental topics, from issues of social sustainability to those of inclusion, through the coexistence of art, artifice and humanity in an auroral place. And it asks the public important questions: what intricate relationship is being established between our existence in the digital world and physical presence? What places and spaces should we think of for inclusiveness and to raise awareness of contingent issues for building the future?
Pininfarina Architecture
A global icon of Italian style, Pininfarina is known for its unrivaled ability to create timeless works, based on its values ​​of Technology and Beauty. Founded in Italy in 1930, Pininfarina today has offices around the world, with a design scope that includes transportation, industrial design, architecture/interiors and automotive design. Pininfarina’s most recent projects in the Architecture division span geographical locations such as Turkey (the New Control Tower of Istanbul airport), the United States (the 1100 Millecento luxury condominium in Miami), Brazil (Cyrela, Vitra and Yachthouse , and the twin towers of Balneario Camboriu), Italy (Juventus Stadium in Turin, The New Stauffer Center for Strings in Cremona, Urban Lounge in Milan). Pininfarina Architettura has also won numerous international architecture awards, recently the Green Good Design Award 2022 for Urban Lounge, the American Architecture Award 2020 with Yachthouse, the International Architecture Award 2020 for Sixty6 and the Red Dot Award 2019 for the City of Miami Bus Shelter Designs. With offices in Turin, Milan,. Miami, New York and Shanghi, Pininfarina Architecture works with a team of 80 professionals trained at the most important academic institutions and research centers in the world and with multidisciplinary backgrounds including architecture, engineering, social sciences and interaction design, linked together through professional experiences. Project team: Giovanni de Niederhausern, Gianni Giuffrida, Simona Penna, Marco Caprani, Giuseppe Conti, Alessandro Mimiola, Silvia Sereno Regis, Giacomo Andreolli.
Patrick Tuttofuoco (Milan, 1974) Lives and works in Milan
Patrick Tuttofuoco’s artistic work is conceived as a dialogue between individuals and their ability to transform the environment they inhabit, exploring notions of community and social integration in order to combine immediate sensorial attraction with the power to trigger profound theoretical responses. Tuttofuoco mixes Modernism and Pop; he pushes the figurative into the abstract, using man as a paradigm of existence, as the matrix and unit of measurement of reality. From this interpretative and cognitive process, infinite versions of man and the context of his existence are produced, from which forms capable of animating the sculptures are generated. Patrick Tuttofuoco participated in the 50th Venice Biennale (2003), Manifesta 5 (2004), the 6th Shanghai Biennale (2006) and the 10th Havana Biennial (2009). His works have been exhibited in various institutions such as the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, (Turin 2006), the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2008) and Casa Italia, Pyeongchang (2018). In 2017 he was selected by the Italian Council thanks to the ZERO project presented in Rimini, Berlin and Bologna (2018).
Maddalena d’Alfonso (1972) Lives and works in Milan.
Maddalena d’Alfonso is an architect, essayist and researcher. He obtained the qualification of associate professor in 2017 after his PhD in interior architecture and museography in 2004. He has applied his aptitude for combining research activity with museographic culture in the conception and planning of exhibitions and cultural programs for public institutions, foundations and museums. D’Alfonso has been a member of the scientific council of ICAMT – the International Committee for Architecture and Museum Techniques of ICOM since 2019. The exhibition Il Paesaggio dei Diritti – Photographing the Constitution, which she conceived and curated for the Municipality of Milan, received the representation medal from the President of the Italian Republic in 2017 and her book Warm Modernity (Silvana 2016) received the Red Dot Award. In 2019 he founded the Md’A Design Agency to offer its work network services, design and interdisciplinary activities by bringing together architecture, curation and museum management to implement sustainable solutions for architecture and culture underlining accessibility issues and democracy of public and collective spaces.
Partner of the Materea installation for computational processing and production service. www.materea.industries
Nieder, for processing, shipping and installation www.nieder.it
Alpewa and Prefa for the supply of PREFA natural aluminum sheets and rivets www.alpewa.com – www.prefa.it
Erco For lighting consultancy and the supply of lighting fixtures. www.erco.com
Brianza Plastica www.brianzaplastica.it
Project financed under the Pnrr funds for accessibility

Giotto | Fountain - The golden space
2023-11-24 - 2024-03-04 | MAN, Via Sebastiano Satta 27, Nuoro, NU, 08100, Italia
a MAN production, Nuoro
from an idea by Chiara Gatti
scientific texts edited by Andrea Nante and Paolo Campiglio, Serena Colombo and Chiara Gatti
Coordination by Rita Moro
The MAN museum in Nuoro presents a new project dedicated to an ideal dialogue between past and present, between classic and contemporary, in line with an exhibition philosophy that for years has led to reflections on the eternal return of universal themes in the art of all times.
After the major exhibitions already reserved for Alberto Giacometti and the archaic (in collaboration with the Giacometti Foundation of Zurich) or Picasso and the myth, in the famous series of engravings for the Vollard Suite, the MAN intends to investigate the connection which, after centuries, connects the spatial research of Lucio Fontana with the value of space in Giotto’s compositions, together with the highly symbolic presence of the color gold in his reification of the infinite and elsewhere.
In the Byzantine and medieval Western pictorial tradition, the desire to represent a real, three-dimensional space progressively weakens. The gold background of mosaics and painted panels offers a deep and vibrant shine and gives the pictorial composition, mostly sacred, an aura of religiosity and mystery, capable of establishing the indissoluble bond between art and faith.
The painting is an icon to be adored and takes on a symbolic value , alluding to eternal and transcendent values.
Gold is not color, but a divine symbol, it exalts the figures, hieratic and two-dimensional, without humanizing them, it abstracts them from the real context, isolating them in time and space and places them within rigid fixed patterns, canceling every custom and every relationship with everyday life: no expression and movement, no familiar landscape, no recognizable building, no comparison with experience.
A new sense of reality and space , true and profound, emerges in medieval art thanks to the personality of Giotto (ca. 1267-1337), who was already praised by his contemporaries because he «changed the art of Greek into Latin and reduced it to the modern», as Cennino Cennini wrote in his Book of the Art. The sacred and golden space, two-dimensional and transcendent, a curtain of light that isolates from the external world of the previous tradition, is “pierced” by Giotto, in search of a third dimension, profound and real.
The gold background becomes a real sky, atmospheric, bright and clear on spring days, illuminated by the light of the moon and stars (and even comets) in the dark night.
Giotto discovers how painting can depict what the eye sees, including the possibility of illusion, wonderfully experienced for the first time in the two famous fake choirs in the Scrovegni chapel in Padua. Here, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, even before the invention of Renaissance perspective, Giotto introduced the idea of ​​trompe-l’oil, of painting capable of transforming space and creating illusionistic environments. A space without figures and in which – without warning – the outside world bursts in. The two fine, empty rooms could be animated by singers at any moment. And, from the Gothic mullioned window, you could see the swallows circling in the air, from the eaves of the nearby Eremitani church, as Roberto Longhi wrote in 1952.
“Spacious Giotto” is the definition that the great critic suggested for this new way of thinking about painting, explaining, in relation to the Paduan chapel, that «for those who, now, place themselves in the center of the floor of the chapel, that is, in the most suitable place to embrace with with a single glance the wall into which the apse opens immediately becomes clear, palm-sized, sensitive to the point of the illusion that the two false rooms “pierce” the wall, aiming to intervene in the architecture of the chapel itself. The two Gothic vaults contribute to the effect of veridical illusion by contributing to a single center which is on the axis of the church and that is in the ‘real’, existential depth of the apse; the internal light is convenient which, starting from the centre, spreads inversely into the two rooms, even onto the columns and jambs of the two mullioned windows; the external light of the sky that fills the opening of the mullioned windows themselves is appropriate: not of an “abstract” ultramarine, but of a double blue, which accompanies the (real) one outside the windows of the apse”.
But even in the gold backgrounds – think of the early Madonna of Borgo San Lorenzo and that of San Giorgio alla Costa or the later Maestà of Ognissanti – the metaphysical sky is no longer infinite and, at the same time, indefinite, but rather physical and real. The figures are sturdy like sculptures and in the background, although golden, air circulates. The use of light, of which Giotto always identifies the source, which models the volumes, occupies the space making it plausible and ‘natural’, contributes to the introduction of reality into painting. Habitable. Contributing to the intuitions with which the master grasps the relationships between light and color (the color changes, depending on the variation of the light, not only in intensity but in quality), his original approach to the daily routine of life, in the curious rendering of expressions, objects, and of nature, as a lens wide open once again on reality, in all its aspects, from the most sacred to the most humble, proposed again in the truth of architectural and landscape spaces. Precisely in this reappropriation of reality, beyond the patterns of tradition, life, space, man and his feelings return to being protagonists of painting. A lively and revolutionary approach that is also current for modern and contemporary painting, which owes so much to his thought.
«The fundamental conditions in modern art are clearly evident in the 13th century, in which the representation of space begins», wrote Lucio Fontana in his «Manifiesto Blanco» of 1946. With the artist from Santa Fè, Giotto’s new and illusory space is transformed into a truly three-dimensional space. The light that passes through it makes palpable the principle of the threshold, of the view, of the border place between visible and invisible, also according to the ancient concept of iconostasis that Fontana rereads in the radical synthesis of his gesture. Light therefore breaks into a mental space making it suddenly accessible. It is precisely the same light that, in the gold backgrounds of the fourteenth century – as analyzed in the pages of The Royal Doors by Pavel Florenskij – saw a materialization of the immaterial and which then crossed the “spatial concepts” of Lucio Fontana, caressing the sands, stones, pieces of glass and gold leaf. A pervasive and warm light, but generated by a pictorial act.
The dialogue proposed in the exhibition between a precious panel by Giotto – the Two Apostles from the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice – and a Spatial Concept by Fontana from the MART in Rovereto – it draws not only on Florenskij’s speculations, but also on a long literature concentrated on the courses and recurrences of that magnificent obsession of painting for the representation of the absolute, approached scientifically by great scholars, including Georges Bataille, Lionello Venturi, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michael Baxandall, Jean Servier, Luigi Carluccio. A tension towards the infinite and the transcendent unites ancients and contemporaries and makes the dialogue between Giotto and Fontana significant and timely in the sense of an illustrative thrust, minimalist as well as intense, into the folds of this theme of universal art study. Icon painting presupposes, not surprisingly, a metaphysics of images and light which finds sensitive heirs in the twentieth century. And it is to this metaphysics that authors such as Wildt, Carrà, Casorati and then Melotti and Fontana, as well as international masters of the caliber of Rothko or Yves Klein, have looked, even turning to the use of gold as a vehicle towards the abstract, towards the sacred, beyond the “royal doors” of the iconostasis, beyond the margin between the visible world and the invisible world, “a place where sublime painting manifests itself – to quote Florenskij – in which things are “products of light” ».
«Discovering the Cosmos – Lucio Fontana repeated, not for nothing – is discovering a new dimension. It is discovering the Infinite. Thus, by piercing this canvas – which is the basis of all painting – I created an infinite dimension.”

Cristian Chironi - Living is a language
2023-11-24 - 2024-03-03 | MAN, Via Sebastiano Satta 27, Nuoro, NU, 08100, Italia
As part of the annual program dedicated to research on contemporary languages, which has seen the MAN of Nuoro present artists such as Massimo Grimaldi, Alice Guareschi, Luca Spano in recent months as well as the special plan of residencies shared with the Monte Verità Foundation of Ascona, the museum announces a personal exhibition by Cristian Chironi (Nuoro 1974) exactly ten years after his last project for the MAN. Winner of Strategy Photography 2023 , a call from the Ministry of Culture which allowed the acquisition of nine works from his early production, Chironi will develop an unprecedented path at MAN entitled Living is a language and dedicated to the “Art of living”.
In fact, for some time Cristian Chironi’s research has developed through projects that require the artist to live and work in homes and art residences in various parts of the world. The best known is My house is a Le Corbusier , in which Chironi’s life is intertwined with the architecture designed by Le Corbusier in 12 countries.
Chironi was also a resident at Casa Wabi, an architecture designed by Tadao Ando near Puerto Escondido in Oaxaca. He lived in the house of the architect, designer and urban planner Pierre Jeanneret in Chandigarh, India. He lived in the house of writer Victoria Ocampo in Buenos Aires, designed by architect Alejandro Bustillo and considered the first representative house of the modern movement in Argentina. A housing project is also the one conceived by Chironi for the grottoes of the public gardens of Cagliari, a place full of history which during the Second World War was an anti-aircraft shelter and even a shelter for works of art.
In line with this path, the exploration of historic and important authorial architecture led the artist to also inhabit a “Brownstone” from 1850, a characteristic architecture located in Brooklyn and today considered among the best preserved examples of urban design of the 19th century in the United States.
Chironi’s experience in these architectures is marked by moments of solitary work and moments of exchange with visitors, in which the interpretation of the architecture is rendered through the story and direct observation of its space-time dimension. In these places, works and events are created on the spot, with a deep interest in the mix of different styles and the experimentation of unusual materials. A coherent research, focused on the concept of living explored from different perspectives. In this way, homes become a privileged observation point for the artist to understand the profound meaning of living, to reflect on issues related to gentrification and urban change. Thus, a relationship is established with the context, both human and environmental, which leads the artist to deal with ever-changing cultures and customs.
For the MAN, Chironi conceived the exhibition itinerary Living is a language , coordinated by Elisabetta Masala, in which each of the eight rooms on the second floor of the museum hosts works from different homes previously explored, with unpublished works created for the occasion.
An exhibition branch of the project is also visible at the Santino Angioi body shop in Ottana , a town not far from Nuoro, where Chironi has always customized his Fiat 127 Special, following the color combinations typical of Le Corbusier’s houses. It is no coincidence that the historic car was renamed “Chameleon”, precisely because of its ability to change the color of its bodywork depending on the places where it stops.
Friday 1st December Chameleon will be the focus of in a new version of traveling project Drive , which unites the artist and participants in a journey of urban reflection and imagination on the themes of travel, mobility, social transformations, housing and crossing borders. Together with the stories of Chironi at the helm of Camaleonte, you will be able to listen to the sound compositions created in collaboration with various musicians and sound artists: Francesco Brasini, Alessandro Bosetti, Massimo Carozzi, Daniela Cattivilli, Coro di Radio France, Paolo Fresu, Stefano Pilia, Francesco Serra, Henrik Svedlund, Dominique Vaccaro, Sophie Vitelli, and the unpublished contribution of the multi-instrumentalist from Nuoro Gavino Murgia.
Le Corbusier’s slogan “a house is a machine for living” is thus reinterpreted in Nuoro Drive , giving life to a mobile environment that condenses signs of travel and transit, in a remix of stories, trajectories and values.
The editorial part of the project will see the light in 2024, with the contribution of the American artist Charles Ray, with whom Chironi has started a collaboration for the creation of a bridge for sheep and shepherds to be built in Sardinia.
Color keyboard – FIAT 127 Special (Chameleon)
Santino Angioi body shop
Pip area Lotto 12, 08020 Ottana (NU)
from Mon. on Fri. 09.00 am> 18.00
T: +39.07841786478
01.12.23 _ Nuoro Drive
traveling performance in the city.
Departure from the MAN Museum.
There are five 30-minute trips
Timetables:
3.30pm> 4.00pm; 4.15pm> 4.45pm; 5.00pm> 5.30pm; 5.45pm> 6.15pm; 6.30pm> 7.00pm
Those wishing to participate in the 30-minute journeys with the artist can send their name, telephone number, along with the specific time slot in which they wish to participate, to the email info@museoman.it
Thanks
Fondation Le Corbusier – Paris
Fundación Casa – Mexico City
Lacasapark Art Residency – New York
The Casa de la Cultura of the National Art Fund and BIENALSUR – Buenos Aires
Pierre Jeanneret Museum – Chandigarh
Italian Cultural Institute – Mexico City
Andrea Boghi Collection – Brescia
Anna and Francesco Tampieri Collection – Nonantola
Olnick Spanu Collection – New York
Cristian Chironi is a multidisciplinary artist who lives between Mexico City and Italy. He uses different mediums including performance, photography, video, architecture, design, often creating a kind of interaction between them. Upcoming exhibitions include: Italian Cultural Institute of Mexico City; CAMERA – Italian Center for Photography, Turin. Upcoming performances include: Ivrea (Olivetti) Drive, Ivrea. www.cristianchironi.it

Die Zauberberge - The enchanted mountains
2023-10-10 - 2023-11-13 | MAN, Via Sebastiano Satta 27, Nuoro, NU, 08100, Italia
6 October – 12 November 2023
Inauguration Friday 6 October, 6.30 pm
Talk Saturday 7 October 2023, 12pm
On the occasion of Contemporary Art Day, AMACI – Association of Italian Contemporary Art Museums
Nuoro and Monte Verità, it all started here. In two ideal islands, two border lands and, at the same time, of belonging. Magnetic places rich in history, which welcomed the protagonists of the collective exhibition last April Die Zauberberge_The enchanted mountains . The residencies, created in collaboration with the Monte Verità Foundation of Ascona, involved six artists, three Sardinian and three Swiss, who discussed common themes during the research period.
The artists of Swiss origin – Tonatiuh Ambrosetti, Maya Hottarek, Lisa Lurati – carried out an investigation into the rich local identity in the Sardinian territory. At the same time, three young Sardinian artists – Giaime Meloni, Elena Muresu, Marco Useli – have inhabited Monte Verità and the spaces of the famous “hill of utopia”, where architecture, art and dance have always dialogued in a virtuous way. An anarchist paradise that has attracted thinkers, painters, writers, philosophers, designers from every corner of Europe: from the anarchist Kropotkin to the Hungarian choreographer Rudolf von Laban, from the Dadaist Hugo Ball to the architect Walter Gropius, from the artist Hans Arp to Karl Gustav Jung, up to the great curator Harald Szeemann.
The works exhibited in Die Zauberberge_The enchanted mountains they represent the result of this research, a contemporary look at places symbolic of primordial components, of spiritualism and autarky. They are photographs, sculptures, graphics, installations, works forged from a unique experience, from the journey and isolation, from the wild and lush beauty of nature, from the absolute breath of woods of archaic memory.
Artists on display
Tonatiuh Ambrosetti
Born in Lugano in 1980, in 2006 he graduated from the ECAL – École cantonale d’art de Lausanne, where in 2012 he obtained a professorship. In 2006 he founded the photographic studio Daniela et Tonatiuh together with Daniela Droz. In his work he develops the conflictual relationship between man and nature, carrying out research on non-objective photography that goes beyond the conventional boundaries of the image to also include sculpture, engraving, drawing and sound and video installations. His works have been exhibited in festivals, galleries and museums of international importance, including: the first edition of Alt+1000 in Rossiniere (2008); the ETH Hönggerberg forum in Zurich (2009); the Royal Danish Academy of fine arts, Copenhagen, Denmark (2011); Bâtiment d’Art Contemporain, Genève (2014); Le musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, France (2015); The PRINTSPACE, London, UK (2016); the Center d’art Contemporain Yverdon-les-Bain (2016).
Maya Hottarek
Born in 1990, she is an artist who works with different materials and in different fields, from ceramics to cinema, from sound to everyday objects. He studied visual arts at the Bern University of the Arts and at the Institut Kunst in Basel. One of his main interests is to articulate the complex interactions between the individual, society, economy and nature. Among the main exhibitions, mention should be made of exhibitions at the N/A/S/L in Mexico City, at the Liste Art Fair in Basel and at the Kunsthaus in Appenzell.
Lisa Lurati
Born in Lugano in 1989, she trained at the Vevey photography school and at the Institut Kunst in Basel. His work oscillates between an almost decorative meditation and an aesthetic celebration which, upon closer inspection, reveals a kaleidoscopic universe of symbols and signs that is never fully explained but which nevertheless manages to sustain a curious coherence. Recent personal exhibitions include: In-between things , Ann Mazzotti Gallery, Basel, 2022; Raving Cosmos , CACY, Yverdon-les-Bains, 2021; Nebula , Forma Gallery, Lausanne, 2020; Joke. Very cheerful, almost early, Photoforum Pasquart, Biel, 2018.

Giaime Meloni
Born in Cagliari in 1984, he is a photographer with a PhD in architecture, who currently lives between two islands: Île-de-France and Sardinia. His work empirically explores the ways in which physical space is reproduced and invented. His research has been presented in international publications and conferences (Canada, France, Italy, Portugal). In 2017 he was nominated among the finalists for the Graziadei Prize with his project Das Unheimliche . In 2019 he was selected by CAMERA – Italian Center for Photography – to take part in the FUTURES program supported by the European Union. In the same year he was among the finalists of the Francesco Fabbri Prize for contemporary photography. Since 2022 he has been an associate professor at Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de la Ville et du Territoire de Paris Est, where he teaches the arts and techniques of representing space.
Elena Muresu
Photographer, visual artist and performer, born in Alghero in 1990. He obtained a Master’s degree in Cultural Management for the Promotion of the Territory at 24Ore Business School, a degree in Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts of Sassari and in Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera. She develops two artistic and professional paths in parallel: on the one hand photography and video and on the other urban culture, which push her towards the exploration of multiple languages ​​to investigate the theme of the relationship between human beings and their territory. Since 2021 she has been a photographer and videomaker for Antonio Marras. In 2021 he exhibited at the XVII International Architecture Exhibition in Venice with the video documentary “Skatepark Italy” (2022 finalist at Via dei Corti, Independent Film Festival, Catania).
Marco Useli
Painter and engraver, born in Nuoro in 1983. Graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence in 2007, after two years in London he attended the master’s degree in Contemporary Design with Stone at the Polytechnic of Milan. Since 2012 he has been part of Milano Printmakers. He develops research in the field of art graphics between Milan and Sardinia, where in 2017 he opened an artistic studio in Dorgali. He currently teaches Design Planning at the Francesco Ciusa art high school in Nuoro.

Luca Spano - After the Last Image
2023-10-06 - 2023-11-13 | MAN, Via Sebastiano Satta 27, Nuoro, NU, 08100, Italia
edited by Elisabetta Masala
The project is the winner of Photography Strategy 2022 , promoted by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture
Between what is visibly perceptible and what our senses cannot grasp there exists a liminal space, a web of conflicts and latent potential. A suspended threshold, which is not only physical but also mental, which stimulates the passage towards new levels of knowledge.
The project After the Last Image by Luca Spano explores the biological and technological limits of seeing, investigating the relationship between the visible and the invisible and, in particular, that gray area between the two: the last known point, a border area whose mystery invites discovery.
The photographic and installation works that compose After the Last Image , the winning project of the 2022 Strategy Photography competition, explore the limits of vision and the speculative processes that lead to knowledge of the world. The research residencies carried out during the project, a fundamental part of the conception, allowed us to delve into heterogeneous stimuli from different disciplines. At the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Spano explored that academic trend that has as its object the visible and the practices of the gaze, questioning what an image is and what its role is in contemporary society.
The reflections on the ways in which the visual instrument enters into the study of reality then led the artist to associate photographic practice with geography. A period of residence at the Inter-University Department of Territorial Sciences, Projects and Policies (DIST) of the Polytechnic of Turin allowed him to delve deeper into the figure of the geographer, a scholar who, starting from sight, creates those distortions of space that we commonly call ” maps”.
During his residency at the Deutsches Optisches Museum in Jena, Germany, Luca Spano focused on what it means to see in a process that, starting from optical experience, comes to consider cultural, sociological and anthropological implications.
The series 12 hidden information reconsiders the centrality of the eye in the relationship between human beings and reality, taking up a selection of illustrations on vision problems taken from Theodor Axenfeld’s ophthalmology manual (1912), consulted by the artist in the Deutsches Optisches Museum. In a similar process of decontextualization, eye diseases are treated as pure illustrations that, once abstracted, resolve themselves into changing and fascinating forms. The pupils and irises thus become planets of a constellation of knowledge.
The multiple nuances that make up After the Last Image they push us to broaden our perspectives by stimulating new questions and new visions. The artist encourages us to reflect with greater awareness on the complexity of perceptive phenomena and on the ambiguities that shape our world. It creates a bridge between the known and the unknown and takes us on a journey of crossing the border. That liminal interval full of possibilities, where we always move our limits a little further.
Biography
Luca Spano (1982, IT) is a multidisciplinary artist. He trained between Europe and the United States, with a degree in Communication Sciences at Sapienza University in Rome, an MA in photography at the London College of Communication in London and an MFA in visual arts at Cornell University in Ithaca (US). His work has been exhibited internationally in museums, galleries and festivals such as: Triennale di Milano, MACRO (Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome), BredaPhoto Festival (NL), Malta Festival (PL), Saavy Contemporary in Berlin (DE), Luis Adelantado Gallery (ES), Paolo Erbetta Gallery (IT), Caelum Gallery in New York, Institute of Italian Culture in Paris, Institute of Italian Culture in Hamburg and the Higher Regional Ethnographic Institute.
Luca has been artist in residence at Fundacion Botin (ES), NoArte Paese Museo (IT), Künstlerischen Tatsache (DE), Kultur einer Digitalstadt (DE) and visiting artist at Arts Letters and Numbers Residency (US) and others. His work has received awards and grants such as the MEAD Fellowship (UK), CCA Grant and Einaudi research grant (US), The John Hartell Award (US), Graziadei Prize (IT), the Premio del Paesaggio Regione Sardegna (IT), New Work Prospect Art Grant (US), Photography Strategy 2022 MiBACT (IT).
He was one of the directors of the OnOff Picture photographic agency based in Rome, co-director of the NYC Creative Salon organization in New York, and creator of OCCHIO, an image research and teaching laboratory based in Cagliari.
His work is included in public and private collections such as the MAXXI Museum in Rome, the Cornell University artist’s book collection, the Graziadei collection and the Sardinian Higher Regional Ethnographic Institute.
Project created in collaboration with
Deutsches Optisches Museum, Jena (DE)
Inter-University Department of Territorial Sciences, Projects and Policies (DIST) of the Polytechnic of Turin, Turin (IT)
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Florence (IT)
Mousse Publishing bilingual catalogue
Critical texts by: Elisabetta Masala, Giangavino Pazzola, Anna Caterina Dalmasso, Massimo Canevacci, Luca Spano and Giovanna Corraine, Franziska Perske and Maria Dienerowitz, Ute Dercks, Marco Santangelo
Press office
STUDIO ESSECI – Sergio Campagnolo
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Tel. +39.049.663499
contact person Simone Raddi, simone@studioesseci.net
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Matisse - Metamorphoses
2023-07-14 - 2023-11-13
curated by Chiara Gatti from a project by Sandra Gianfreda, curator at the Kunsthaus Zürich with Claudine Grammont, Cheffe du cabinet d’art graphique, Center Pompidou
Henri Matisse he is one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, but, paradoxically, an important part of his production is still overlooked. The figure of Matisse the sculptor is, in fact, not known in the most subtle aspects of his research. Although painting has always remained his main expressive modality, “his” language and the form of investigation of the visible to which he dedicated himself throughout his life, Matisse simultaneously conducted a reflection on sculpture (and also on engraving) which makes he is one of the most complete artists of the last century. His versatility explored various techniques simultaneously, with curiosity and keen experimentation. Against the background of this multifaceted intelligence, Matisse’s sculptural work reveals a parallel life to that of the colourist, a double soul devoted to matter, volume, space, which deserves to be placed in relation – in terms of processes and goals – with that of other great sculptors of the 20th century, heirs of Auguste Rodin’s lesson and who became geniuses of the avant-garde. From Brancusi to Giacometti, from Boccioni to Wotruba.
For the first time in Italy, the MAN Museum today dedicates an exhibition to the sculpture of Henri Matisse. The exhibition project, edited by Chiara Gatti , rereads and adapts to the spaces of the Sardinian museum, the new and complex concept of the Matisse Métamorphoses exhibition organized in 2019 by Kunsthaus in Zurich and the Matisse Museum in Nice.
A project intended to rethink Matisse, to reconsider the role of his work in the art panorama of the first half of the 20th century, in the light of a broader aesthetic research that sees sculpture as the vehicle for new and revolutionary formal solutions. In this necessary insight, it emerges that the human figure in particular was the main theme of his tension towards synthesis. From the investigation of the body, posture, gesture or physiognomy, Matisse developed a path of geometric reduction of the image which led him towards an abstraction bordering on the radical.
As the artist himself stated in 1908 in his Notes d’un peintre: « what interests me most is neither the still life nor the landscape, it is the figure ». The figure, not for its pathos, its lyricism, moods or existential inflection, but for its sense of presence in space and its ideal evolution over time. In fact, Matisse questioned the body in its relationship with the immediate environment and with the changing circumstances over a long period of time. Here then is the evolution of a naturalistic fact into a final synthesis that sublimates contingency into a dimension of absolute perfection. Space conditions, in turn, a system of subtle relationships between physical substance and inhabited void, between gestures and the dynamic lines that they draw in the air.
The exhibition begins, therefore, with an analysis of the artist’s method of creation and his work of transforming the figure into serial variations. The itinerary aligns sequences of bronzes, dating from the early 1910s to the 1930s, and subjects presented in their various subsequent states and combined with the artist’s sources of inspiration, including photographs of nudes and posing models, as well as an essential selection of few paintings in which the motifs themselves reveal the double soul of his parallel research, pictorial and sculptural, in particular in addressing the dominant themes of the nude, dance and odalisque. Through around 30 sculptures and around twenty drawings, engravings, as well as period photographs and original films, Matisse’s sculpture will be placed in relation to the subjects of his life, his magnificent obsessions linked to the female form, to the physiognomic research on models, to the attitudes and plasticity of the volumes.
Against the background of this composite research, here are many unique figures, such as The tiarees , of which there are no different stages, while others are repeated at different intervals, varying and transforming, like the famous cycle of Jeannette (IV) . From here the artist develops a conceptual approach that can be described as a sort of method of formal progression. As in a “metamorphosis”, which explains the title of the exhibition well, his figures evolve from a natural transcription to a radical synthesis of the visual data.
Even in his painting – as has been widely studied by critics in the past – it is possible to detect this process of metamorphosis, without however ever going so far as to consider actual cycles of works as “series”, but rather as the result of a long process of elaboration which finds in sculpture and graphics, combined with painting itself, investigative tools connected to each other, in the idea of ​​a liquid boundary between techniques. An example of this is there ‘Odalisque of the Museo Novecento in Milan, which finds subtle and surgical counterparts and relationships with contemporary drawings and bronzes and whose entire sequence the exhibition will align.
The exhibition is created in collaboration with Expo poster.
click here to listen to the audio guide
Technical details
In collaboration with Kunsthaus Zürich, Musée Matisse de Nice
Bilingual ita/en catalogue: Sole24ore Cultura
Exhibition coordination by Rita Moro, Myrtille Montaud and Manifesto Expo
Texts by Sandra Gianfreda, Bärbel Küster
With the participation of the Archaeological Museum of Nuoro
Media Partnership : Radio Monte Carlo – www.radiomontecarlo.net
Press office
STUDIO ESSECI – Sergio Campagnolo Via San Mattia 16, 35121 Padua Tel. +39.049.663499
contact person Simone Raddi, simone@studioesseci.net www.studioesseci.net

Alice Guareschi - Je m'appelle Olympia
2023-07-14 - 2023-09-18 | MAN, Via Sebastiano Satta 27, Nuoro, NU, 08100, Italia
edited by Chiara Gatti
coordination by Elisabetta Masala
Winning project of PAC2021 – Plan for Contemporary Art promoted by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture
The MAN Museum of Nuoro presents for the summer, in the spaces of its project room, I call Olympia, winning project of PAC2021.
Je m’appelle Olympia was born from an “action for hall lights” performed by Alice Guareschi, only once, for a selected audience of guests, on 12 April 2012 at the Olympia Music Hall, an iconic and legendary Parisian theatre. The 16 photographs that make up this series were taken on the same day as the action, immediately after the live activation of the light choreography in the empty space of the theatre, which involved all thirteen tracks of colored lights, permanently integrated into the architecture. With a fixed shot, similar but not identical, following the precise original score composed by the artist, the images return a sequence of different movements of light inside the room. The photographic series thus becomes a new synthesis of the image-idea and the intention at the origin of the performance: to activate a theater without any show, play it live , reawaken the latent memory, the secret life removed from the spectator’s gaze. By breaking down the duration of the action into frames, which can be seen both individually and as a whole, the spatial declination of the work now allows the idea to be embraced in a single glance.
The setup site-specific, studied by the artist for the MAN, displays all the photographs of the series, alongside the punctuated musical score, on the staves, from the times of the action, where presences or pauses of the lights replace the musical notes in a complex polyphony. The space – conceived as a small theater – is reached by crossing the entrance curtain, evocation of access to an audience, but also a border, a limit that separates the place of life from its representation. Immersed in silence, the ideal space of the theatre, removed from voices or sounds, stages itself; the light inhabits it, revealing its nature and physiognomy.
«The starting point is an image: that of a luminous choreography that suddenly activates in the empty space of the hall, at a moment of the day when no show is scheduled and the theater rests uninhabited and silent. Like an explosion of energy accumulated over the years, like the unexpected revelation of a secret life that concerns only the building. A few months ago, when I found myself for the first time at the Olympia for a concert, I was deeply struck by the silent wonder of the lights in relation to the somehow romantic monumentality, marked by time and its stories, of the theater. To such a point that music has become an almost superfluous element for me. Without having foreseen it, I had become a spectator of another show. At the end of the evening I left the hall last, to be able to take full advantage of the powerful atmosphere of the space left empty after the concert: the perception of the very small scale of my body in relation to the spectacular majesty of the theatre, even more striking when on the scene nothing is happening, it also had a truly surprising effect on me. In the narrative suspension of this present space-time, the link between past and future suddenly seemed to show itself with its extraordinary charge of memory and possibility. “This is the space that stories inhabit,” I thought. Left alone with herself again, the room seemed to vibrate secretly.” Alice Guareschi, Paris, 12 April 2012
Open call
Workshop for adults – aimed at art students, artists, researchers, performers, musicians
My name is Olympia
Thursday 14th – Saturday 16th September 2023
Within the framework of the project My name is Olympia , the workshop for adults conducted by Alice Guareschi, in collaboration with the MAN educational department, aims to directly involve participants, stimulating the development of critical thinking, discussion and the growth of creative abilities. Starting from some food for thought that the work raises – such as, for example, the idea of ​​”activation of a space”, of “latent memory of a place” and of “the secret life of a building in the absence of spectacle” – the work will be divided into different moments and spaces, starting from the MAN to explore and involve other important points of the social and cultural fabric of Nuoro, including the civic theatre. The objective is to create a direct link between the work, the artist, the museum and the city, where the participants will be active figures, who through their theoretical and practical involvement and their personal experience, will become agents bearers of a new look.
Biographical note
Alice Guareschi (1976) is a visual artist and filmmaker, lives and works in Milan. Graduated in philosophy with a thesis on experimental cinema, she articulates her research between video, writing and the creation of objects. She has been an artist in residence in Paris at the Pavillon du Palais de Tokyo and at the Cité Internationale des Arts, in Triangle, New York, and at Kaus Australis, Rotterdam. In 2008 he won the Scholarship for Young Italian Art of the Friends of the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, and in 2022 he won the PAC2021 production call promoted by the General Directorate of Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture. Since 2018 he has taught Project Writing and Creative Research at the IED in Milan, and since 2022 Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies I at NABA. He has participated in collective exhibitions and festivals in Italy and abroad, exhibiting in public and private institutions including: Fondazione Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Turin; PAC, Milan; MAMbo, Bologna; GAMeC, Bergamo; Mart, Rovereto; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome; Dunkers Kulturhus, Helsingborg; Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard, Paris; Spanish Academy and German Academy at Villa Massimo, Rome; Villa Arson, Nice. Main solo exhibitions: Galleria Alessandro De March, Milan; Sonia Rosso Gallery, Turin; Center Culturel Français, Milan; Rivoli Castle, Turin; Italian Cultural Institute, Paris; Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn; Galerie DREI, Cologne; Joey Ramone Gallery, Rotterdam. Film festivals and screenings: Filmmaker Doc Festival, Milan; Impakt Festival, Utrecht; Italian Cinema London Festival; Pesaro New Cinema Exhibition; Milan Design Film Festival; The Foundation, Rome; Milan Triennial; Macro, Rome.
Press office
STUDIO ESSECI
Via San Mattia 16, Padua
Tel. +39.049.663499
contact person Simone Raddi
simone@studioesseci.net
www.studioesseci.net

Studio Pratha
2023-03-03 00:00 - 2023-06-25 00:00 | MAN, Via Sebastiano Satta 27, Nuoro, NU, 08100, Italia
Studio Pratha is an experimental creative hotbed born in 2017 from an intuition of Graziella Carta, founder and creative director of the group. Welcoming inspirations from visionary designers and eclectic artists, Studio Pratha reinterprets in a contemporary key, a refined weaving technique with a thousand-year history, now practiced only in the village of Sarule.
The execution phase of the tapestries remains firmly anchored to the heart of Barbagia, where the master weavers create the Pratha works using exclusively Sardinian sheep’s wool and working on the traditional vertical loom, totally manual: faithful to an extremely complex and precious executive specification, they create only a few centimeters of product per day, working with two or four hands.
The creative phase instead crosses island and national borders, opening up to new collaborations who bring Studio Pratha tapestries to international museums and galleries. Although ranging between various styles and inspirations, Pratha’s works move mainly in the dimension of abstractionism with a conceptual imprint, but there is no shortage of experiments in the figurative field, including the recent tribute to Guernica Tessere la Pace, born from the collaboration with the MAN Museum of Nuoro.
Today, design and high craftsmanship intertwine on Studio Pratha frames, in a continuous experimentation that fully fits into the contemporary artistic panorama.

Odessa Steps
2023-03-03 00:00 - 2023-06-25 00:00 | MAN, Via Sebastiano Satta 27, Nuoro, NU, 08100, Italia
edited by Giovanni Francesco Tuzzolino and Federico Crimi
with the contribution of Paolo De Marco

in collaboration with
Territorial University Center of Agrigento_University of Palermo,
National University Lviv Polytechnic,
State Archive of the Odessa Region.

The MAN Museum in Nuoro will host, from next March 3rd, a new and important dedicated exhibition to the history and myth of the Odessa steps , renamed by popular culture the “Potemkin Staircase” following the success of the famous film by Sergei Mikhailovich Ejzenštejn, The battleship Potemkin of 1925.
The original project of the staircase, a monumental hinge between the sea and the city, was signed, in the 1830s, by the architect Francesco Carlo Boffo (1796-1867) whose biography remained shrouded in mystery for decades, poised between an oral tradition that linked him to Sardinia and new documentary pieces that the exhibition today reveals along the way, thanks to recent archival discoveries.
After the exhibition dedicated to Picasso and the genesis of Guernica, the MAN Museum returns to reflect on a historical episode which nevertheless has a topical value, in the context of the tragic conflict in Ukraine, exactly one year after its beginning. Twinning with Ukrainian institutions from this perspective, it takes on a value of support and cultural and civil closeness.
Francesco Carlo Boffo is a figure of great interest, both for his architectural experimentation with themes linked to urban space, and for his role as interpreter of Italian architectural culture, already very much alive between Russia and Ukraine since the reconstruction of the Moscow Kremlin in the Renaissance, and which has given the multicultural Odessa, a melting pot of various cultures and a cosmopolitan city as well as a free port, that unmistakable classic face also betrayed by the choice of a Greek name for the city.
Boffo presents himself, therefore, as the main author of many public spaces, of representative architecture and of the staircase itself, symbol of the place, which connects the port esplanade to the Piazza de Richelieu, along an ideal axis that the exhibition will return through the exhibition Of drawings provided exceptionally by the Odessa Archive, original plans on loan from prestigious Italian institutes, including the National Central Library of Florence and the Historical Archives of Turin, in addition to the reconstruction of the drawings and a scale model created thanks to the collaboration with the Agrigento Territorial University Center of the University of Palermo.
The MAN will delve into the architect’s work for the first time, underlining the contribution offered in the construction of the architectural and urban identity of Odessa, together with the fascinating human and artistic story suspended between the legend of his birth on the island and the real Swiss origins of Ticino, fertile ground for many architects who later grew up in Italy and its centers of academic culture, strongly linked to the discipline of design.
But the story of Boffo and “his” staircase could not fail to intertwine with that of a film which made this panorama universally known in the eyes of the twentieth century public, transforming a masterpiece of nineteenth-century architecture in an icon of the big screen, thanks to the tight, violent and dramatic editing of the famous Ėjzenštejn sequence, engraved in the common imagination. In the catalog text by film critic Roberto Nepoti we read: «It is an indisputable sign of iconicity that the sequence is absolutely the most cited in the entire history of cinema, both in the form of homage and in the form of parody, by countless emulators of the Russian master. So much so that, at the end of the 1990s, the well-known critic Roger Ebert wrote: “… the famous massacre on the Odessa steps is so cited, that it is probable that many spectators saw the parody before the original”».
Enriching the exhibition are two romantic paintings of notable value and quality, a stormy sea by Ivan Konstantinovič Ajvazovskij from 1897, granted by National Museum in Warsaw, and a large port of Odessa by Rufim Gavrilovitš Sudkovski from 1885, arriving from Kunstimuseum in Tallinn, Estonia . The presence of some rare votive offerings with scenes of Sardinian brigantines in the bay of Odessa, before and during the Crimean War, is curious.
Architecture and cinema alternate along the entire route, now delving into the constructive analysis of the staircase, now reviewing the frames of a film that has set a precedent and which exalts, in its own shots, the formal details of the scenographic ramp. Period panoramas and new views duet with the brilliant solutions of Ėjzenštejn’s direction at the center of the video installation that tells of its genesis.

Coordination
Rita Moro and Elisabetta Masala
from an idea by Tommaso Esca

Catalog Libria editions, texts by Viktor Proskuryakov, Federico Crimi,
Giovanni Francesco Tuzzolino, Paolo De Marco, Roberto Nepoti

Video installations edited by Storyville
in collaboration with Cineteca Milano

Press office
STUDIO ESSECI – Sergio Campagnolo
Via San Mattia 16, 35121 Padua
Tel. +39.049.663499
contact person Simone Raddi, simone@studioesseci.net
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OLIVE BARBIERI
2023-03-03 00:00 - 2023-06-25 00:00 | MAN, Via Sebastiano Satta 27, Nuoro, NU, 08100, Italia
60 unpublished color photographs and a large wallpaper
On March 3, the Sardinia Foundation, in collaboration with the MAN Museum, inaugurates the exhibition Twelve ve ee hs nine – Dolmens and Menhirs in Sardinia Of Olivo Barbieri , edited by Marco Delogu and Chiara Gatti.
The artist’s unpublished series concludes his work within the Sardinia Commission, a project that supports the production of contemporary works of art through the AR/S Arte Condivisa platform, with the aim of opening a window on the territory, the history and stratifications that characterize the island, through the eyes of curators, male and female artists invited to live residency and production experiences in Sardinia.
Olivo Barbieri, one of the major contemporary Italian artists and photographers, was invited by the Sardinia Foundation to turn his gaze to the island, to undertake three journeys over two years, deciphering a space-time bubble between archeology and contemporary imagination .
The object of the research is the heritage made up of numerous megaliths, dolmens and menhirs scattered across the island, according to logics still unclear to scholars, observed in their ability to modify the space that surrounds them.
Barbieri, who had already traveled extensively in Brittany and Carnac in the 1980s, attracted by these megalithic monuments, by the mystery of their genesis and their function, even if years late and with a certain sense of guilt for having waited so long, arrives in Sardinia to approach an equally unique heritage, little known, even for many almost unknown.
Guided by the wise availability of scholars such as the archaeologist Riccardo Cicilloni, by the indications of the local inhabitants, by researchers and by local memories, Barbieri in Twelveve ee hs nine – Dolmens and Menhirs in Sardinia it provides a reconnaissance, a free and non-scientific sensorial mapping of the megaliths, but above all it tells how the space around them has changed, how the world has changed through unconscious shapes, stratifications and logical passages.
The photographs record authentic situations of coexistence and interpenetration between the archaic past, recent buildings and the vegetal landscape.
The artist has broadened his gaze from the single site to the anthropized landscape, towards inhabited contexts that have absorbed the volumes and history of these extraordinary objects of resistance, in a new scenario, modified by the context of the finds and their influence, inspiring new images and new architecture.
Olivo Barbieri, through this investigation into variation, with a clear observation process free of linguistic frills, but taking the perceptive possibilities of seeing to the extreme, traces an imaginary geography of Sardinia that is profound, silent and different from the well-known beauty of the internationally famous coast.
In his travels from Dorgali to Laconi, from Calangianus to Barrali, he explores adventurous routes between cultivated fields, pastures and villages in search of vestiges sometimes swallowed up by vegetation or concrete to return them to the present.
In the dialogue with Chiara Gatti published in the catalog Olivo Barbieri says: «I worked and reflected a lot on the modification of the space around each find, how the eras passed by superimposing grafts, layers, passages. It is a syncretic temporal tale…”
As Marco Delogu and Franco Carta write in the text that accompanies the exhibition: “the shapes of the stone are imbued with time and Barbieri captures their mystery, encloses color and light in the frame, enhances their aesthetic strength, questions their suggestions magic and the symbolic-sacral value that dolmens and menhirs have always evoked in the mind of the observer, be he a scholar or a layman”.
Barbieri’s work is consistent with the original productions of the Sardinia Foundation created in recent years, productions whose objective is to tell the island through the vision of art, asking protagonists of primary caliber to restore an image of the island in dialogue with the most dynamic national and international creative contexts. From this dialogue emerge the signs of an unusual Sardinia that, at times, we struggle to recognise.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with 105 photographs published by Punctum Press with texts by Andrea Cortellessa, Riccardo Cicilloni, Marco Delogu and Franco Carta and a dialogue between Olivo Barbieri and Chiara Gatti.
BARBIERI OLIVE TREE
Twel ve ee hs nine – Dolmens and Menhirs in Sardinia
From 4 March to 25 June 2023
Continuous opening hours: 10am – 7pm | Monday closed
Press Office: UC studio – press@ucstudio.it
Chiara Ciucci Giuliani chiara@ucstudio.it – ​​mob +39 3929173661
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Fading in
2023-03-03 00:00 - 2023-04-13 00:00 | MAN, Via Sebastiano Satta 27, Nuoro, NU, 08100, Italia
The MAN continues its investigation into the languages ​​of the 21st century by inaugurating the first of a series of Project Rooms, a new exhibition concept focused on the aesthetic universe of contemporaneity. The ground floor of the museum will be conceived as a multifaceted space, capable of changing shape with each project with the aim of acting as a spokesperson for today’s artists and their vision of the world.
The first date features the protagonist Massimo Grimaldi with the exhibition Fading in , which offers a selection of five photographic reports created between 2010 and 2021.
Grimaldi’s poetics develops in a constant tension between ethics and aesthetics. The artist has developed a working method that involves systematic collaboration with EMERGENCY, a humanitarian association created with the aim of offering free medical support to civilian victims of war and poverty. Since 2007 the artist has participated in various competitions with projects which envisaged, in case of winning, the donation of the sum to EMERGENCY and the creation of reportages in places where the NGO is active. The most striking case dates back to 2009, when Grimaldi won the international MAXXI 2per100 competition with a project which established to donate 92% of the prize of 700,000 euros to EMERGENCY for the construction of the Pediatric Center of Port Sudan and to document the activity of hospital, from its construction to full operation. An approach that demonstrates how Grimaldi reflects on society and intervenes on it, re-discussing the role of the artist.
In Uganda is the main work presented at MAN. The video projection is the result of a reportage, created at the beginning of 2021, which moves on a double level: on the one hand it describes life inside the Children’s Surgical Hospital in the Ugandan city of Entebbe, focusing the lens on the EMERGENCY staff and the patients; on the other, it shows the human and landscape beauty of Entebbe, the peninsula that stretches along the northern coast of Lake Victoria, on which the hospital stands. As the images fade away, we realize that talking about reportage is rather simplistic. In Grimaldi’s works the documentary aspect remains in the background compared to the affective component, which is dominant. In this way, his works trace a red thread between two worlds: at one end there is the museum where the works are enjoyed, while at the other end there is a reality that may appear distant to many, but not for this is less true.
Images of projects carried out in Sudan, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, in the Central African Republic, follow one another in the exhibition on the screens of the latest generation iPad Pro with a fade (precisely a “fade in”), from which the title of the exhibition derives. As the critic Luca Cerizza points out, “the melancholy that relentlessly pervades Grimaldi’s work arises from that dichotomy that the artist shows as never reconciled, between the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of art and, even more specifically in his case, of a sensual attraction towards a world of perfect, hyper-defined, mostly abstract forms and images, and the awareness that every work of art risks being crushed by a process of obsolescence by which it is overcome – like any other product – from a subsequent linguistic proposal, from a new style, from the satisfaction, in short, of a new desire”.
The systematic use of the latest Apple models on which a looping sequence runs is a consolidated practice of Grimaldi’s poetics. In this way, since the (self-imposed) possibility of deciding the external appearance of the works is no longer possible, it is the artist himself who questions his own status, aligning himself with technological evolution and its contradictions. Thus, the assumption of art for eternity collapses. The result is a work with an ineluctable destiny, works that become obsolete in the space of a few years, subservient to a race for increasingly pressing technical progress.
Fading in it is the occasion for the release of a new edition of The MAN notebooks , with a critical insight by Luca Cerizza who traces the evolution of Massimo Grimaldi’s work from the beginning of his research to today.

Biography

Massimo Grimaldi (Taranto, 1974) is an Italian artist who lives and works in Milan. His practice investigates the nature of what we conventionally call “art”, the way in which it is perceived, evaluated and understood. His research is a continuous interrogation on the criteria of the production and circulation of images, on the power and limits of aesthetic speculation, on the possibility of its ethical redefinition. The artist has had solo exhibitions at Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2009); Villa Croce Museum, Genoa (2012); Team Gallery, New York (2011/2013); West, The Hague (2014); ZERO…, Milan (2006/2010/2013/2017/2019/2022). His works have also been presented in numerous group exhibitions, including Italics at Palazzo Grassi, Venice e MCA , Chicago (2008-2009) and the 50th Venice Biennale (2003). In 2009 Grimaldi won the international MAXXI 2per100 competition, using the prize for the construction of the EMERGENCY Pediatric Center in Port Sudan.

BELONGINGS
2022-11-18 00:00 - 2023-02-19 00:00 | MAN, Via Sebastiano Satta 27, Nuoro, NU, 08100, Italia
The work’s important entry into the collection Mother sewing by Mario Sironi, 1905-1906, the result of a recent purchase by the MAN museum from a private collection in Milan, represents the opportunity for a presentation to the public of the latest acquisitions received in the form of purchase, loan or donation. The exhibition aligns the works within a path that presents, for each of them, a historical and thematic analysis, a narrative that places them in the background of the permanent collection, explaining their value and role within the identity of the collection itself .
The work of Sironi (1885-1961), in particular, is accompanied by a critical insight by Elena Pontiggia , the greatest Italian expert on the master, collected in the pages of a small dossier publication intended to inaugurate the museum’s new editorial series, The MAN notebooks .
«Sironi is not looking for an intimate scene – writes Pontiggia – indeed he could have signed Munch’s Saint Cloud Manifesto (1899), which proclaimed: “We will no longer paint interiors […], women knitting”. Of course, his is an interior, but what interests him is the volumetric construction: the solid female figure, the chair firmly planted on the floor, the blocks of color of the table and furniture. If anything, you can sense a thread of melancholy in the loneliness of the mother, all alone in the silence of the house. However, the scene also communicates his sense of dignity and almost his intimate approval for the duty accomplished: that interior approval which, as Thomas Mann makes Johann Buddenbrook say, “is the most certain happiness that can be achieved on earth”.
The Mother Who Sews has had relatively recent critical success because Sironi, due to his subsequent rejection of divisionism (shared by many critics in the years between the two wars), never exhibited it in his lifetime. We find her for the first time in an exhibition only in 1969, eight years after her death. The first to talk about it, however, was Costantini, a friend of his youth and then a relative of the artist because he had married his sister Marta. In his Contemporary Italian Painting, published in 1934, the critic expressly recalls the Mother who sews “among the works of intense colour”. The adjective may surprise, because the set of greens and blues in the painting can be defined as “intense” for its refinement, but certainly not for its brightness. Sironi does not adopt divisionism to accentuate the luminous effects of the composition, and does not exploit the contrast of complementaries. It is true, however, that compared to its dark palette of the 1920s, The Mother Who Sews stands out for a much more lively and naturalistic chromatic range.”
Among the other protagonists of the exhibition he then stands out Costantino Nivola (1911-1988), with a new work Times Square, dated 1946, which joins funds already held by the MAN and which arrives in the collection following a significant restoration (curated by Maria Albai) and which is now valued as a unicum in the master’s production, due to the monumental dimensions of the canvas and for the complexity of the New York subject, which aligns with his most famous production, with some variations worthy of investigation.
The presence, along the route, of a dialogue between Maria Lai (1919-2013) and Jorge Eielson (1924-2006), in view of a future exhibition that the MAN will dedicate next year to the fraternal relationship established over time between two great names of the second half of the twentieth century, formed during the time of the Peruvian artist’s stay in Sardinia. For the occasion, two sewn books by Maria Lai enter the collection, one distinct from her famous “geographies”, and a small breviary entitled Sono qui, loaned by the heirs. The Eielson archive instead provides a major node in the cycle Amazon , which refers to the archaic symbolism of the “quipu” in the Inca empire, the knot as a language, method of writing and accounting, for measuring time in calendars, drawing up censuses.
The result of recent exhibitions and recent donations, here are still works by Edina Altara (1898-1983), Vittorio Accornero (1896-1982), Salvatore Fancello (1916-1941) and Anna Marongiu (1907-1941), as well as the splendid photographs dedicated to Sardinia by Lisetta Carmi (1924-2022 ), alongside leading contemporary figures such as Martthe Guixé (born in 1964), with his textile works, large tapestries inspired by tradition and applied to designer seating, Christian Niccoli (born in 1976) with the video ZWEI (Two) produced within the Italian Council, and Paolo Cavinato (born 1975), fresh from the exhibition Sensorama where his surgical perspectives have opened passages into a space that doesn’t exist.
A separate section, an exhibition within the exhibition, is reserved for the site-specific intervention of Giovanni Campus (born 1929), the great Sardinian artist, Milanese by adoption, who will unravel his Euclidean boxes made up of compositions evolving over time in the MAN rooms. Walking among its geometries, one perceives spaces inhabited by irregular graphs, analytical quadrants, Cartesian planes where lines and segments run parallel and intersect infinitely.
Campus orchestrates lines, rhythms, perimeters, edges, measurements, rules and exceptions to erect minimal fences, synthetic landscapes, a domain of signs that follow each other on the walls until they design three-dimensional places within which the spectator moves as in an abstract painting, in a liquid border between painting and architecture.
The “time” component is decisive and gives the title to the cycle of works Tempo in process. Since the Seventies, in the era of conceptualism, the artist has worked on the unity of the exhibition, with tables connected to each other in sequence, thus demonstrating the transformation of the modular elements – traces made of rope or metal – in the space of a pre-established duration. The effect is complete when painting and sculpture integrate, creating enveloping scenarios, flat surfaces projected into the third dimension. Building space through drawing, in the time of practice and method, is the research that runs beneath the surface of all the master’s reflections based on rigor and lyricism. For Campus, mathematics is poetry.
Giovanni Campus’ precious intervention will be accompanied by a dossier from the new editorial series The MAN notebooks , with a critical text edited by Chiara Gatti.

Picasso and Guernica
2022-11-18 00:00 | MAN, Via Sebastiano Satta 27, Nuoro, NU, 08100, Italia
edited by Michele Tavola
From September 23rd to December 31st 1953 Guernica was exhibited in Hall of the Caryatids of the Royal Palace of Milan , together with more than three hundred other works by the Spanish master, giving shape to the largest Picasso retrospective ever held in Italy. Subsequently the exhibition was moved to Rome, but in a reduced format and above all without Guernica , which from then on never entered our country again. The Hall of Caryatids, which at the time of hosting Picasso’s masterpiece still showed signs of the bombings of the Second World War, thus amplifying the meaning of the work, on that occasion also hosted other dramatic compositions explicitly denouncing the disasters of war such as the Massacre in Korea And Carnage .
Today Guernica he no longer travels, he never leaves Spain and his room at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. It will no longer return to Paris, where it was created, commissioned by the Spanish Republican government for the 1937 Universal Exhibition, it will no longer return to the MoMa in New York, where it spent a good part of its exile before returning to its homeland, and it certainly will not he will return to Italy again. Seventy years after the historic exhibition at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, the MAN in Nuoro celebrates the Italian passage of Guernica , symbolically and artistically fundamental for a generation of artists, art critics and Italian citizens.
The Nuorese homage is divided into two main sections: the echo of Guernica in Picasso’s artistic production and the story of the genesis of the work through the visual story of Dora Maar, photographer and companion of the Spanish artist at the time.
The first section finds its main focus in the extraordinary diptych of engravings entitled Franco’s voice and lie , a true graphic counterpart of the large painting. Picasso began engraving the first plate in January 1937 but soon abandoned the work. In the month of May, just after the tragic bombing of the Basque town, he completed both matrices just as he was executing the monumental canvas, using the same studies and the same ideas. However, it is not at all a small version of the painting, but an original invention in its own right, which is inspired by the same thought and the same creative impetus. Around Franco’s voice and lie we will collect a small but significant series of engravings, drawings and paintings that directly relate to the gestation of Guernica or which, having been created in the same period, closely recall the style and themes of the famous painting.
The second soul of the exhibition would revolve around the extraordinary testimony of Dora Maar, who documented Picasso’s work day by day, with her own photographs. It is a series of shots that are both moving and fundamental for the philological reconstruction of the creation of Guernica . There will also be no shortage of images taken in 1953 by Mario Perroti on the occasion of the Milanese exhibition, in the touching display of the Hall of Caryatids marked by bombing, a tragic situation that convinced Picasso to exhibit his masterpiece in that context so similar to the soul of the painting.
The ideal project of the exhibition will also include a documentary section that will make the journey of the highest quality, completing the narrative in an anniversary that Italy is called to celebrate and of which the MAN Museum of Nuoro would be the leader.

SENSORAMA
2022-07-08 00:00 - 2022-10-30 00:00 | MAN, Via Sebastiano Satta 27, Nuoro, NU, 08100, Italia
The look, the things, the deceptions
from Magritte to augmented reality

inauguration Friday 8 July at 6.30 pm
edited by Chiara Gatti and Tiziana Cipelletti
with the scientific contribution of Baingio Pinna of the Department of Biomedical Sciences of the University of Sassari, author of the book Visual perception , the Mill, 2021
Exhibition project by Denis Santachiara
Coordination of Rita Moro and Elisabetta Masala
Video installations by Storyville

SENSORAMA adopts the model of the Museum of Illusions in a cultured and original way and entrusts the works of contemporary artists and videomakers with the exploration of the relationship between Vision and Perception with the aim of showing the complexity of cognitive phenomena and the “pleasure” of being deceived.
Illusion is our reality. Because we see little of the world out there that our eyes are able to see. “How your eyes trick your mind”, as the English say. The result is a representation of things that is not real at all. It’s up to our brain to orient ourselves between appearances and enigmas.
Those who deal with perception start from these premises, but know that they have centuries of philosophical discussion behind them, from Plato onwards. The question “do we really see reality?” It’s an age-old dilemma. Today, however, neuroscience can begin to provide an answer by studying the sense organs and analyzing the brain’s ability to interpret the signals that they send it.
The MAN museum in Nuoro, which has always been dedicated to research and the different languages ​​of the contemporary, inaugurates a new exhibition season which aims to reflect on some themes prompted by the drama of the pandemic and confinement: interrupted communication, the gaze veiled by the diaphragm of a screen, the reading of images removed from sight and returned in a virtual reality. Going back to look, to train the eyes and to ask questions about the truth (or otherwise) of vision is the aim of an exhibition which, starting from historical antecedents, from the noble fathers of a painting of truth and deception, such as René Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico, it opens the spectrum to the most recent aesthetic investigations into perception and authenticity. Here are the mirror photographs of Florence Henri or the optical-kinetic tables of Alberto Biasi, the enveloping and disturbing environments of Peter Kogler or Marina Apollonius; and again, the anamorphic sculptures of Marc Didou or the performances understood as real human trompe-l’œil of Liu Bolin, the invisible man.
The title of the exhibition SENSORAMA it is inspired by the name of a machine created in 1957 by the American director Morton Heilig to test synesthetic experiences in his cinema of experience, in order to amplify impressions, not only sound with stereophonic audio, but also tactile, dynamic and olfactory. To see the music is the name of a section reserved for discovering synesthesia, the psychic automatism which consists in associating two contents referring to two different sensory spheres in a single image.
SENSORAMA is a lot of cinema, art of fireworks par excellence, “factory of illusions” since its debut and ground of visual experimentation of the avant-garde. The exhibition itinerary contemplates the fantastic cinematography of George Melies based on the disappearance of objects obtained with a primitive stop frame and the levitation of things and people with stop-motion shooting, to arrive at the phantasmagoric interactions between artistic avant-gardes (Léger, Man Ray, Picabia, Cocteau, Duchamp…) and cinema. Experimental cinema which, by adopting the statute of magic and playing with deception and perceptive deformations, throws our “usual” experience of reality to pieces.
The wonderful paradoxes of the digital age. With the augmented reality installation, “non-reality” goes beyond its boundaries, floods our perception and gives access to new meanings in a multilayer vision/version. Without the use of devices, but thanks to the use of your own mobile phone (Bring Your Own Device), you will be able to experience the “intelligent and complex” fascination of a multi-layered content, an essential completion of the vision of a world in transition.
The project is enriched by site specific installations, for example in the case of the interventions studied ad hoc for the MAN by artists such as Felice Varini , author of drawings in space, both monumental and ephemeral, as well as a magical room designed by the designer Denis Santachiara and a cave of books dug like rocks by imprints of impalpable bodies created by Marco Cordero.
SENSORAMA in short, it wants to represent the zero degree of perception, useful for cleaning up the gaze, to return to amaze ourselves in the face of the paradoxes of sight, to start observing the works again with an inquiring gaze, to get closer to the images aware of a fluid limit between real and virtual, but ready to sharpen our eyes to reveal the mechanisms that orchestrate the process of vision itself. An invitation to learn to look. But, above all, to doubt.
Artists
René Magritte, Giorgio de Chirico, Florence Henri, Alberto Biasi, Luigi Mazzarelli, Peter Kogler, Felice Varini, Marina Apollonio, Denis Santachiara, Marc Didou, Peter Miller, Liu Bolin, Marco Cordero, Humans since 1982, Ole Martin Lund Bø, Paolo Cavinato, Cinzia Fiorese, Marco Di Giovanni, Kensuke Koike.
Electa catalog with texts by Baingio Pinna, Chiara Gatti and Tiziana Cipelletti

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