MAN_Museo d'Arte della Provincia di Nuoro

Giusy Calia
2009-09-04 - 2024-10-04
Giusy Calia
Love, please remember

04.09 – 04.10.2009

For Autumn in Barbagia, the MAN, in collaboration with the Municipality of Bitti, presents Giusy Calia’s exhibition Love, please remember . The works exhibited in the room of the Multimedia Museum of Canto a Tenore are accompanied by a video of the artist herself.
≪The multiple Ophelias who inhabit those worlds of images that Giusy Calia has long created for them, are beautiful, silent, solitary creatures: they emerge, in those worlds of waters and reflected lights, of mud and flowers, graceful and intangible like water lilies, absorbed in an endless dream, in a secret, dilemmatic and painful reminder, like a nocturnal and starless navigation≫ (Gavina Cherchi).

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.

Giorgio Andreotta Calò_in girum imus night
2024-03-28 00:00 - 2024-06-16 00:00 (Europe/Rome) | 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.

Micol Roubini _The Magic Mountain
2024-03-28 00:00 - 2024-06-16 00:00 | 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.

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”.
Press offices
Sara Zolla | press@sarazolla.com | Tel. 346-8457982
UC studio Press Office – press@ucstudio.it
Chiara Ciucci Giuliani chiara@ucstudio.it – Tel. 392-9173661
Roberta Pucci roberta@ucstudio.it – Tel. 340-8174090

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 .

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.

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.

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).

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.
.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Franco Mazzucchelli. Blow Up
2025-12-05 - 2026-03-01
Opening, March 8, 6:30 PM

Curated by Marina Pugliese

In collaboration with MUDEC – Museum of Cultures, Milan

The MAN Museum in Nuoro announces the upcoming solo exhibition Blow Up, dedicated to Italian artist Franco Mazzucchelli (Milan, 1939). Curated by Marina Pugliese and developed through a partnership with MUDEC – Museum of Cultures in Milan, the exhibition traces Mazzucchelli’s artistic research from the 1960s to the present, through a selection of works and photographs that highlight the experimental, social, and participatory nature of his practice.
In keeping with MAN’s ongoing research into artists whose work engages with themes of sustainability and community, Blow Up retraces the artist’s path through public and shared space, artistic actions that have reactivated and redefined urban environments through participatory interventions. The exhibition reflects how Mazzucchelli has, over time, invited communities to reclaim neglected spaces through new meanings and collective engagement.
Key works in the show reference his early Abbandoni (Abandonments) from the 1960s and the later series A. TO A. (Art to Abandon), including interventions staged outside the Alfa Romeo factory on Via Traiano in Milan (1971), in the square of the Art High School in Turin (1971), and in Piazza dei Priori in Volterra (1973). These actions are centered around the act of “abandoning” large inflatable PVC structures in public spaces: embodied gestures of openness, interaction, and critical reflection on liberating art from traditional exhibition contexts.
Originally intended for children at a nearby playground, the 1971 Alfa Romeo intervention unexpectedly became a moment of leisure and imagination for factory workers and ultimately even a political tool, when workers used the inflatable structure to block the passage of vehicles. In Volterra, in 1973, during a landmark environmental art exhibition curated by Enrico Crispolti, Mazzucchelli’s inflatables turned into the centerpiece of a collective celebration. In Turin, the installation of a giant inflatable arch in an urban setting led to new interpretations of both landscape and social fabric.
One historically significant work, presented for the first time in a public Italian institution, is Caduta di Pressione(Pressure Drop), first shown in 1974 at Galleria Diagramma in Milan. The piece involved measuring oxygen consumption in a room using a hand-held vacuum gauge, depending on the number of guests present. The result was a kind of cartography of breath and vacuum, recorded like a scientific experiment in file cards that still preserve pressure readings and the names of visitors, including artists and critics such as Agnetti, Fabro, Nigro, La Pietra, as well as Gillo Dorfles, Urs Lüthi, and Tommaso Trini.
The exhibition also features two monumental inflatable PVC sculptures: a 26-meter-long Squid (Totano) and a 12-meter-high Cone, exemplifying Mazzucchelli’s concept of sculpture as an expanded, temporary form. These synthetic, large-scale structures take on playful, non-functional forms that alter architectural space and provoke spontaneous visitor interaction. Over the years, Mazzucchelli has meticulously documented these public responses as a form of behavioral analysis in the presence of these foreign and unexpected insertions.
A site-specific installation from the Riappropriazioni (Reappropriations) cycle—first developed in the 1970s at locations such as Parco Sempione and La Triennale in Milan—occupies and engulfs one of the museum’s rooms. Constructed from plastic film membranes, the work cancels spatial boundaries and proposes new modes of aesthetic experience. Viewers are invited to physically enter the structure, immersed in its metaphysical suspension, which clings to ceilings and floors like a living membrane. Enclosed within it is an early sculpture by Mazzucchelli, created during his time studying under Marino Marini at the Brera Academy. The work embodies the ongoing dialogue between the artist and the collective dimension of his practice: art as a space for encounter, a process open to symbolic reappropriation of space by its inhabitants.
Through the interplay of monumentality and lightness, suspension and adhesion, Mazzucchelli’s work embraces materials once considered experimental—such as plastic—while offering contemporary ecological reflections. The exhibition title, Blow Up, nods to the explosive imagery of Antonioni’s iconic film, capturing the essence of an artist who has redefined the language of contemporary sculpture, moving art out of the museum and into daily life in a constant exploration of aesthetics, society, and participation.
Franco Mazzucchelli
Born in 1939 in Milan, where he currently lives and works. Mazzucchelli is renowned for his pioneering experimentation with synthetic materials beginning in the 1960s, and for his large-scale environmental installations capable of disrupting the everyday conventions of local communities. His practice—close to the ideal of total participation—investigates social dynamics, with works that become temporary parts of the urban landscape. The public is naturally drawn to touch, move, play with, and even take them away.
Since the early 2000s, his research has taken on a more aestheticized direction with the Bieca Decorazione(Dull Decoration) series: an ironic term the artist uses to describe painting as a purely aesthetic pleasure, while critiquing its links to market logic. Mazzucchelli’s environmental installations have been presented in numerous locations in Italy and abroad, including the Alfa Romeo Factory, Milan; Piazza San Fedele, Milan; Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Milan; Castello Sforzesco, Milan; Piazza dei Priori, Volterra; Lake Como; Munich; the Camargue.
His works have featured in major international exhibitions, including the 60th Venice Biennale (2024); 13th and 11th Quadriennale of Rome (1999 and 1986); the 37th Venice Biennale (1976); the 15th Milan Triennale (1973); and in prominent international institutions such as MAPS – Museum of Art in Public Spaces, Køge (2025); Museo Madre, Naples (2024); MACRO, Rome (2021); Centre Pompidou-Metz (2021); Cité de l’Architecture, Paris (2021); ArtScience Museum, Singapore (2020); Konsthall Lund (2020); Kunsthalle Wien (2019); ZKM – Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe (2019); nGbK, Berlin (2018); and Museo del Novecento, Milan (2018), among others. In 2022, Mazzucchelli received the Alfredo d’Andrade Lifetime Achievement Award. He served as Acting Director of Brera 2 and Professor of Sculpture Techniques at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan.

Franco Pinna. Sardegna a colori. Fotografie recuperate 1953-67
2025-12-05 - 2026-03-01
Concept and scientific direction: Archivio Franco Pinna
Inauguration: Friday 5 December 2025 at 6:30 pm

The exhibition Franco Pinna. Sardegna a colori. Fotografie recuperate 1953–67 marks a further stage in the exploration undertaken by the MAN on photographic language and its relationship with Sardinia, a land of inspiration and experimentation for generations of artists, besides celebrating the one-hundredth anniversary of the acclaimed Sardinian photographer’s birth. Franco Pinna (La Maddalena, 1925 – Rome, 1978) was a master of 20th-century Italian photography and, through this exhibition, the MAN is showcasing works that were long forgotten, offering visitors a new and surprising dimension of his perspective: that of colour. In keeping with recent investigations carried out by the Museum on authors and visions of the Sardinian landscape, this exhibition broadens our perception of a photographer who was almost exclusively appreciated so far thanks to his black and white shots.
The exhibition comprises approximately eighty works, including colour photographs – most of these are displayed for the very first time – and archival material, and unfolds through a journey across Pinna’s visual and professional history, offering new hints for a critical assessment of his oeuvre. The images were selected further to a thorough recovery and digital restoration of the original hues and are displayed along with black and white shots of the same objects, thus offering an occasion for a comparison. The exhibition also includes transparencies retrieved from the Archivio Franco Pinna, which testify to the comprehensive documentary approach endorsed by the photographer. A selection of period magazines, including Vie Nuove, Noi Donne, L’Espresso, and Panorama, confirms his commitment to the use of colour, which would lend a sense of modernity to the glossy magazines vs. the historicization implied in the classic black and white shots.
The exhibition begins with Orgosolo 1953, Pinna’s first colour reportage in Sardinia, to then explore the most meaningful stages of his production on the Island – Canne al vento (1958), Argia a Tonara (1960), and the shots used for his acclaimed volume Sardegna. Una civiltà di pietra (1961) – up to his reportages on banditry and the protests of shepherds of 1967. The sequences create a sort of long narrative, highlighting the evolution of a language that takes on an autonomous and poetic dimension through colour, capable of seizing the spirit that enlivens an archaic and all the same modern Sardinia.
What emerges is the bond between documents and rituals, which pervades his oeuvre and distinguishes his way of observing reality: as Federico Fellini quoted in 1976, Pinna showed a “slowness typical of a hierophant”, suspended between the gaze of a scientist and that of a minister of cult. It is precisely through this dimension suspended between documents and rituals that the exhibition housed at the MAN wants to review his oeuvre: a path through reality culminating in a revelation.
Franco Pinna
(La Maddalena, 1925 – Rome, 1978)
One of the most renowned photojournalists of his time, Franco Pinna was a key figure of Italian photographic Neorealism. After activism in Rome in the Resistance movement and a brief stint as a documentary filmmaker, he made his debut as a professional photographer in 1952 in the Roman cooperative Fotografi Associati and followed the anthropologist Ernesto de Martino on his ethnographic expeditions to the Lucania and Salento regions. In 1961, he published Sardegna. Una civiltà di pietra, which would be his most important publication. Beginning in 1964, he became Federico Fellini’s trusted photographer. Through more than 300,000 shots, Pinna managed to combine civic engagement and aesthetic rigour, documenting the transformation that Italy was going through in those years and capturing the human side of the 20thcentury with a poetic and keen gaze.
The Archivio Franco Pinna, based in Rome and Bologna, has gathered and enhanced the photographer’s heritage since 1997, promoting research and exhibitions that keep his memory alive.
Concept and scientific direction by Archivio Franco Pinna
Curator: Paolo Pisanelli, OfficinaVisioni
in collaboration with Cinema del reale, Erratacorrige, Big Sur
Coordination with MAN by Alessandro Moni
Digitalisation, digital restoration, editing of photographs: Gloria Fulgeri, Claudio Domini
Video-installation direction and editing: Matteo Gherardini, Paolo Pisanelli
Officina Visioni coordination by Federica Facioni
Catalogue by Nomos edizioni, ita/en
Graphic design by Sabina Era

© Archivio Franco Pinna, Rome/Bologna all rights reserved

ALFREDO CASALI. Isolitudine
2025-12-05 - 2026-03-01
Opening, December 5, 6:30 PM

Curated by Massimo Ferrari and Chiara Gatti

In the context of a year devoted to an extensive and multifaceted reflection on the concept of the island – understood not only in its geographical dimension, but also as a semantic device, a generator of narratives, cosmologies, ideals, and utopias – the MAN Museum in Nuoro continues its path of investigation with a solo exhibition by Alfredo Casali, entitled Isolitudine, scheduled for the winter season.
After MinorIsland Fotographic notes from 1990 to today Islands and Idols, the new exhibition (on view until November 16), is part of a series that explores the concept of insularity through different perspectives, giving voice to artistic visions that question the meaning and boundaries of the island — as an idea that becomes a place, a concept that takes shape in space.
An exponent of a pictorial research deeply devoted to the very language of painting and to its persistence in a delicate balance between narration and abstraction, between sign and matter, Alfredo Casali presents at the MAN Museum a body of new and recent works that delve into the theme of porous boundaries, archaic origins, voluntary detachment, and, at the same time, the re-emergence from the shallows of forgetfulness. The neologism “isolitudine” shapes in his painting a complex and fascinating existential condition: that of those who identify with the island — in its physical coordinates, but also in its dwelling within the unconscious. an ancestral longing for belonging, intertwined with a melancholic sense of isolation.
Sailing through the territories of identity, memory, and the perception of the self and the world, isolitudine becomes a state of mind — a fulfilling sorrow for the surrounding emptiness, a vertigo before the liquid desert. Intense pages of modern insular literature, from Salvatore Satta to Gesualdo Bufalino, have unearthed the fossils of a life lived on the margins and yet at the centre — within a microcosm that is also infinite, in a solitude that is also beauty. In this acute tension between rootedness and detachment, between the thirst for elsewhere and the pride in that remote territoriality theorized by anthropologist Matteo Meschiari, one rediscovers a universal dimension that unites distant peoples — all children of an island, all inhabitants of isolitudine.
Alfredo Casali gives visual form to it through painting. Since his earliest works, influenced by the lyrical abstraction of Gastone Novelli and Cy Twombly, by visual poetry, and by a suspended figuration imbued with a sense of waiting and heir to Morandi’s silent lesson, the artist has traced within space the most minimal boundaries — vital places confined to the dimension of an intimate everyday, sublimated into domestic archetypes: the house, the tree, the chair, the patch of landscape opening onto the void of the sea or the sky. Formal rigor, geometric synthesis, and an attention to the sign as both an expressive and literary element — rooted in his solid philosophical training — nourish a coherent and deeply meditated pictorial practice and imagery, slow in gesture, in pauses, in the articulation of planes that construct further voids. His rarefied and essential poetics now reaches the threshold of the island — a drawing with frayed edges on the maps of consciousness, an epiphany of rock and sand upon the Cartesian plane of human and cosmic geography.
Alfredo Casali was born in Piacenza in 1955, where he currently lives and works. He graduated in Philosophy from the University of Bologna in 1983, under the supervision of Luciano Anceschi. After an articulated journey through painting, visual poetry, and theoretical studies, he arrived at a personal artistic language characterized by an essential poetic inquiry and by the recurrence of archetypal elements organized in thematic cycles. Among the first to recognize the value of his work was Giovanni Fumagalli, who welcomed him into the historic Galleria delle Ore in Milan and guided him as a mentor between 1986 and 1996. Casali took part in the 32nd Milan City Art Biennale (1993) and in the Cremona Biennale (1993 and 1999), and over the years has exhibited in numerous solo and group shows. Among his most significant exhibitions are the solo show at the San Fedele Cultural Center in Milan (2011); his participation in the exhibition dedicated to Imre Reiner and international abstraction at the Museum of Art of Mendrisio (Switzerland); and the group exhibitions Sogno e Confine (Biffi Gallery, Piacenza, 2012) and La natura obliqua (Il Chiostro Contemporary Art, Saronno). In 2014, he presented a solo exhibition at Galleria Ceribelli in Bergamo. Among his recent exhibitions, in 2019 he showed at the Studio d’Arte del Lauro in Milan, and in 2023 at MAN – Museum of Art of the Province of Nuoro, in a project developed in collaboration with the University Campus of Agrigento. The recent exhibition held in 2023 at the Magazzino del Sale in Cervia, entitled Alfredo Casali, Giovanni Fabbri. Geografie vita, territorio, storia, anticipated by a few months the major retrospective of 2024 Alfredo Casali. La memoria delle cose, curated by Massimo Ferrari for Volumnia in the Renaissance nave of the former Church of Sant’Agostino in Piacenza.
They have written about him: Michele Tavola, Franco Fanelli, Sara Fontana, Stefano Fugazza, Ivo Iori, Stefano Crespi, Flavio Arensi, Chiara Gatti, Marina De Stasio, Rocco Ronchi, Giorgio Seveso.
Catalogue ITA/EN Nomos Edizioni
Text byi Massimo Ferrari and Chiara Gatti
Coordination Rita Moro
Graphic by Sabina Era

Pellizza e Ballero. La divina luce
2026-03-13 - 2026-06-14
curated by Chiara Gatti on a project by Rita Moro
with the scientific contribution of Gabriella Belli and Antonello Cuccu
13 March – 14 June 2026
inauguration: Friday 13 March at 7 pm
A friendship, an exchange of correspondence, a shared vocation for landscape, painting, for translating nature into heartbeats of vibrant colour. This new project launched by the MAN Museum of Nuoro aims at tracing the ideal heritage that Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo (1868-1907), the noble father of Italian Divisionism, passed down to Antonio Ballero (1864-1932), a Sardinian artist who, suspended between past and progress, ferried a style of painting still imbued with precepts of Realism towards the experimental explorations of Divisionism, conveying the late-romantic culture that distinguished the artistic landscape of Sardinia of the time in the direction of a scientific investigation into colour, without neglecting a vibrant narrative of the images transposed onto the canvas. Antonio Ballero and Pellizza da Volpedo were bound by mutual esteem, a strong bond that was broken by the tragic death of the Piedmontese artist. Drawing on Pellizza da Volpedo, Ballero vigorously contributed to introducing Sardinia to the new language of painting and the theories delving into the “separation” of colours, which were at the heart of the artistic debate on the national and international scale. It was precisely thanks to the lesson learned from Pellizza da Volpedo and an intense intellectual exchange with the latter that Ballero managed to conquer a leading role in the evolution of the artistic exploration experienced by his Island, which rightfully took an active role – via his action – in the debate that was shaking the landscape of art on the ‘mainland’.
This project, curated by Chiara Gatti and coordinated by Rita Moro, with the scientific counselling of Gabriella Belli, a major scholar of Italian Divisionism, and of Antonello Cuccu, a scholar and expert of Sardinian art, explores the close connection between the solutions devised by the Sardinian master and the spur he received from his privileged relationship with Pellizza da Volpedo through an iconographic comparison and the letters the two artists exchanged between 1904 and 1907, which document their contacts and their intense dialogue. Two works by Ballero were praised by Pellizza and labelled as a true “revelation”, as he personally declared to the Sardinian artist in a brief letter. It was through and thanks to this ideal closeness that Ballero’s expressive and formal exploration shifted towards an aesthetic growth strewn with new and more powerful social content.
The exhibition path comprises over thirty works distributed by sections. They include ten masterpieces by Pellizza da Volpedo on loan from important Italian museums and galleries: the Gallerie degli Uffizi in Florence, the Museo Nazionale Scienza e Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci in Milan, the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan, the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin, the Pinacoteca Divisionismo in Tortona, and the Pinacoteca in Alessandria; besides public and private collections that provide ongoing preservation and curatorial support for Antonio Ballero’s oeuvre, including the Municipality of Atzara and the MAMA Museum, the Chamber of Commerce, Industry, Craft, and Agriculture of Nuoro, the Banco di Sardegna bank, and the MAN Museum of Nuoro with its collection of ten works by the Sardinian master. Thanks to a collaboration with the Ilisso publishing house of Nuoro, the art exhibition will also display precious archival material, the correspondence exchanged between the two artists, coeval photographs of the Quarto Stato (The Fourth Estate), and period photographs of Ballero and Nuoro.
Antonio Ballero debuted as a painter at the Esposizione Artistica Sarda (Sardinian Art Exhibition), held at the Palazzo della Provincia in Sassari in 1896. He would soon distinguish himself on a national level after swiftly detouring a Realism of macchiaioli imprint and a poetic feeling for the painted subject, mostly landscapes, and rather looking to the new style introduced by Divisionism and its multifaceted and variable conception of light and colour that was to be tackled via an innovating scientific method applied to painting. The style advocated by Ballero earned him the accolade of Pellizza da Volpedo. Salvatore Farina – an experimental writer born in Sorso who had moved to Milan, where he became closely associated with the Scapigliatura and the Italian intelligentsia of the time – also acknowledged Ballero’s breakthrough in the art world and paralleled his action to Giovanni Segantini, to his lyrical balance between Realism and Symbolism, between a daily life imbued with mundane concerns and a reified sacred dimension that takes shape in the spectacle of nature and in the silent gestures that man performs to pay homage to the universe.
Ballero’s bonds and acquaintances with authors of the calibre of Grazia Deledda and Francesco Ciusa, in Sardinia, and of Leonardo Bazzaro and Carlo Fornara, speaking of artists active in the rest of Italy, contributed to stirring his vocation to give voice to and recount the diuturnal existence of the humble. His dignified figures, solemn yet fragile in the face of the cosmos, inhabit rural horizons where the profound sense of truth in things is sublimated in a timeless expectation. “The paramount pride of shepherds wandering through the bush, the wild galloping of horses, or the willowy and joyful movements of dancers”: that is how Ballero described his subjects, who held on tightly to the traditions of his native land while being projected into the absolute. The radical shift from works such as Paesaggio con alberi (Landscape with Trees) from 1890 to paintings such as Mattino di Marzo (A March Morning) from 1903 ca. or L’appello serale (Evening Call) from 1904, clearly shows the turning point of the Sardinian artist: the heritage of Corot with his use of colour tones, fluid brushstrokes, and vibrant naturalism, which Ballero adhered to in his juvenile years, was forsaken to the benefit of a painting achieved with small patches, complementary colours, penetrating twilights, and a choral vision of the characters.
Pellizza Da Volpedo, four years junior to Antonio Ballero but already in the spotlight of the national artistic landscape, shared his vision with his peer from Nuoro: his thoughts on the theme of landscape, on the spirit of truth, and the power of observation that life requires to be grasped and translated into images, through its intimate and continuous flow. Tracing a connection between the two artists and advancing points of contact therefore means to delve into the richness and results of their dialogue, into the heritage that Pellizza passed down to his friend and how the latter managed to add his contribution to this legacy in his native land, an environment marked by a different, extremely reserved culture, profoundly tied to and dependent on the harshness of its mountains and heart-wrenching tasks of shepherds. An analysis of the conception of Pellizza’s paintings – the scenes that filled his eyes when he glimpsed at moments of daily rural life, suffering because of poverty notwithstanding a mystical hope for a better future – may help understand the evolution of Ballero’s style: the way he embraced a new poetics of everyday life. By wandering across villages, or bordering alleys overlooking barns, we may identify the stages of a journey and pinpoint them according to main themes.
A New Technique for a New Light
Some surviving works from 1894 document Antonio Ballero’s relentless studies on the issue of a relationship between colour and light and colour and material. This milestone date marks the development and growth of his production. Further to his participation at the historical Esposizione Artistica Sarda (Sardinian Art Exhibition) in 1896, when his name was spotlighted along with his senior and more famous peer, Giacinto Satta, Ballero received the acknowledgement for his expressive talent from critics up-to-date with new explorations in the art field. The artistic scenario was at the time divided into two fronts: the advocates of the achievements of Pointillisme in France, on the one hand, and the coeval spreading of a scientific method focusing on the separation of colours championed by Divisionists in Italy, on the other. The latter allowed for greater freedom as to sign and gesture in contrast to the stern rigorousness of their French counterparts. It is no coincidence that 1896 was the year of the Turin Triennale, which enjoyed the participation of outstanding names, including Morbelli, Grubicy, Longoni, Nomellini, Previati, Tominetti, who displayed paintings created by relying on the Divisionist technique. It goes without saying that the number of these innovative paintings was decidedly lower than canvases drawing on traditional languages. However, they were crucial in setting a point of departure for the revolution that was about to take place. “Keeping colours separate and close to one another, rather than mixing them on the palette”, as Grubicy codified in the pages of the Triennale, held in the same year, became common practice to increase the best possible brightness in a painting, whereby this special technique was meant to respond to an expressive need, and was certainly not the ultimate goal of a flaunting virtuoso. “[…] I firmly believe – Pellizza would later state – that this is nothing but the means to lend greater effect to a work of art, and the result will be more consistent with modern ideals.” At the dawn of the 20th century, the Nuoro-born artist, too, embraced this new technique and stubbornly changed his horizon heading for a separation of chromatic elements, which allowed for the creation of enveloping light effects, patches of shadow, and flickering flares, the intensity of which had never been achieved before. In the wake of Pellizza, Antonio Ballero declared in his turn: “The science concerning light and colours should always arouse your interest: only by relying on scientific methods will you acquire confidence of what you are doing. When you replicate the truth, do not think of theories, but rather of translating it with all means at your disposal. Do not embrace Divisionism in and of itself: you must be convinced that your vision will be better expressed by relying on it. When it is too apparent, Divisionism damages a work of art: instead, if you keep its positive principles in mind, the resulting effect is as if you had created your work of art with no effort at all; the work of art must appear as the outcome of a spontaneous gesture. In my opinion, it is not a question of championing a technique that relies solely on dots, or lines, or a blend of pigments; nor entirely smooth or rough, because it varies as the expressions of nature do.”
The Destiny of the Humble
Next to natural phenomena, highlighted by the optical effects created by the Divisionist technique, it is worth underlining the attention devoted by Pellizza da Volpedo and his Nuoro-born peer to a world inhabited by wretched and all the same heroic figures: wrecks, countenances marked by suffering, or motionless persons cloaked in dust. “Once back to my hometown, the first thing I did was to portray my parents […]”, Pellizza recounted in his memories published in Copialettere e minutari in 1895. The extensive literature focusing on realism that permeated the century was retained by Ballero, thanks also to his relationship with Sebastiano Satta and Grazia Deledda. The three artists lived in and shared a land that – not so much dissimilarly from the town of Volpedo – soaked up lifeblood from nature, returning harshness in turn, in a sort of “demoniac sadness” that – quoting Salvatore Satta’s Il Giorno del giudizio (The Day of Judgement) – singled out Nuoro as a “nest of crows”, a steep wasteland, and his prominent people and shepherds as priests and bandits. The true joining link that, in this section, connects Ballero and Pellizza is the feeling of death in the present, the metaphysics that crosses the gaze of their characters, either dead or alive, who are eternally dangling above the cliff of their existence. The characters portrayed by the two masters dialogue, caressed by a compassionate light, using a language that blends Divisionism and sentiment for the sacred in a boundless grievous land. Their figures become the mirror of the entire population living on earth and that is suddenly swallowed up, thanks to the desperate sweetness of a painting that translates the destiny of the humble onto a palette of colours. Ballero’s courtyards, silent and parched in summer, become the symbols of the Sardinian world, of its rhythms, and its social truth.
Art as a Social Function
Against the backdrop of a late 19th-century gentrified Sardinia, the region was hit by the same tragedies that Pellizza blamed by relying on his canvases to condemn them universally. Labour and oppression, poverty and illnesses, fragility and violence that the activism of his art contributed to denouncing with the visual and touching strength of a programmatic manifesto. “It is the works that ennoble the dignity and beauty of humble jobs and the life of people, and that exalt and glorify their joy and sorrow, that will anticipate a true art of the future.” This heartfelt statement, voiced by Ballero in his younger days, would regrettably stumble against the disillusionment with the modern world and a romantic idealism dismayed by the logic of power and labour exploitation. Social unrest spread all over Italy between the two centuries and became a spur to tackle new representations of daily life marked by iniquity, which the social poetics of Divisionist masters translated into accusing images. This was the case of the massacre in Buggerru in 1904, which occurred during a strike of miners that, ideally, can be connected with Pellizza’s masterpiece: the march portrayed in the Quarto Stato (The Fourth Estate), the manifesto of all struggles for the conquest of civil rights at the dawn of modern times. Sardinia experienced social tensions whose extent was certainly not second to what was taking place in the rest of the country. In 1906, thirteen strikes were organised on the Island, and Cagliari staged the notorious revolt of female cigar-makers: this event took place in the month of May, concurrently with the lecture on sculpture held by Ballero. On that occasion, the artist sharply addressed the theme of social function that art was called upon to play, emphatically referring to the social message of works of art that openly revealed a political perspective. The sentiment of an entire epoch, exemplified by the march of peasants and their absolute message of dignity and courage, reached its peak with Pellizza and the heritage he passed down to Ballero, namely the consistency of art with real life: the harbinger of other struggles for the defence of the working class. The seizure of factories by workers anticipated the so-called Biennio Rosso (a two-year period of intense social conflict) and recorded exhausting struggles in a period when the country was facing increasing industrialisation: these battles were immortalised by the masters of colour in their indelible “snapshots” of a country on the edge between tradition and modernity.
The exhibition also spotlights a twelve-minute narrative rich with archival footage, produced by Storyville. The video traces the history of the Quarto Stato (The Fourth Estate), starting with its acquisition via a public subscription. On 17 January 1920, a public call for tenders was launched to gather the necessary funds to purchase the painting, which had remained the property of Pellizza’s heirs. The initial bid was set at fifty thousand Italian liras. That amount was not negotiable. Thanks to the gallery owner Lino Pesaro, the enlightened leftist Milan City Board, led by Mayor Emilio Caldara, had the idea of an open call to raise awareness among locals regarding the ethical sense of the acquisition. The response of the Milanese community was resolute and unanimous. Businessmen, shop-owners, artists, and individual citizens paid free shares, according to their means, in keeping with the feeling of a choral action. On 20 May 1920, the sum due was gathered and The Fourth Estate became a public asset of the City of Milan.
Catalogue published by Edizioni Ilisso
with texts by Gabriella Belli and Antonello Cuccu

Monica Biancardi. Growing capital
2026-04-24 - 2026-06-14
From 24 April to 14 June 2026, MAN hosts Growing capital, an exhibition by Monica Biancardi and the winning project of the PAC – Piano per l’Arte Contemporanea 2025, promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.
The exhibition, curated by Chiara Gatti, grew out of the acquisition of eleven black-and-white photographs documenting, between 2009 and 2023, the coming of age of Bedouin twins Sara and Sarah, whom the artist first encountered during one of her many trips to Palestine. Over the course of seventeen years, Biancardi followed the two young women with consistency, respect, and extraordinary sensitivity, building with them a relationship of quiet trust and unobtrusive presence. Shot on medium-format analogue cameras, the photographs render with poetic force and documentary rigour not only the physical transformation of the twins, but also the deeper shifts in identity, social roles, and the gradual narrowing of their freedoms and prospects. Each portrait holds the tension between permanence and change, bearing witness to the silent resilience of the two young women.
The exhibition expands through a series of accompanying works that broaden its scope: seven maps etched on plexiglas trace the progressive fragmentation of Palestinian territory from 1917 — historical Palestine — to the present day; a travel video retraces the journey from East Jerusalem to the village of Hataleen; and a selection of drawings made by children from the local community explores the theme of the sea — a place that is near yet unreachable, and therefore imagined.
The exhibition is accompanied by the talk Growing capital: Perspectives on a Changing Palestine, scheduled for Thursday 23 April. The event will bring Director Chiara Gatti into conversation with Monica Biancardi, exploring the genesis of the project and its central themes — time, transformation, and the right to freedom — offering audiences the opportunity to step inside the creative and human process that made it possible.
Growing capital is part of MAN’s mission to promote contemporary art as an instrument of testimony and awareness, contributing to a critical reading of the transformations unfolding across human and cultural geographies.
The project is supported by PAC2025 – Piano per l’Arte Contemporanea, promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.

Futurama. Nostalgia for the Future
2026-07-03 - 2026-11-14
Curated by Chiara Gatti and Elisabetta Masala
in collaboration with Storyville
4 July – 15 November 2026

FUTURAMA concludes MAN’s exhibition trilogy devoted to the ways human beings construct their relationship with reality, the environment, and time. Following SENSORAMA, which explored perception as a cognitive structure, and DIORAMA, which examined post-natural ecologies and the reconfiguration of the relationship between the human and the non-human, FUTURAMA focuses on the imagination of the future as a cultural, political, and emotional device.
The exhibition takes its title from the celebrated Futurama attraction presented by General Motors at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, a spectacular installation that offered five million visitors an idealized vision of America’s tomorrow. Through vast immersive models designed by Norman Bel Geddes, the future took the form of rational metropolises traversed by skyscrapers and elevated highways, urban landscapes organized around the dominance of the automobile and the myth of technological efficiency. It was a future that appeared orderly, luminous, conflict-free, and capable of guaranteeing prosperity and control. FUTURAMA draws upon this futuristic vision to reflect on an era in which progress seemed not only desirable but inevitable. The post-war decades ushered in a period of radical optimism, fueled by economic growth, scientific achievements, and technological acceleration. The space race, industrial automation, and the emergence of computing fostered the belief that humanity was entering a phase of definitive emancipation from material and biological limitations.
This confidence gave rise to a widespread aesthetic of the future that permeated every field of visual culture. Artists experimented with new industrial materials—as exemplified by Gino Marotta’s methacrylate bestiary—and new conceptions of space, as seen in Giulio Turcato’s Lunar Surfaces and Lucio Fontana’s Spatial Concepts. Design and architecture conceived modular environments and dynamic surfaces, while fashion embraced geometric lines and abstract cuts in direct dialogue with contemporary artistic research. The exhibition unfolds through iconic objects of 1960s design, characterized by an aesthetic approach that materialized fantastic visions through form and colour, and includes a fashion section curated by Michela Gattermayer. At the same time, science fiction populated the collective imagination with robots, interplanetary travel, and hyper-technological societies. Popular culture played a crucial role in this process. The first Japanese robot toys of the 1950s, inspired by American science fiction and anticipating the giant “super robots” of later animation, transformed fascination with machines into playful objects. Science-fiction book series helped disseminate visions of the future as a realm of adventure, discovery, and limitless possibility. A remarkable selection of Urania publications from the Arnoldo and Alberto Mondadori Foundation is presented in the exhibition.
Among the exhibition’s most compelling sections are video installations dedicated to science-fiction cinema and the Space Race, the symbolic arena in which the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union was played out.
FUTURAMA reconstructs this period of profound faith in progress as a genuine aesthetic utopia, when technology was perceived not as a threat but as a promise of liberation from labour, deprivation, and even mortality itself. Yet the exhibition gradually reveals the fractures underlying this vision. The very forces that fuelled modernist optimism also generated new forms of inequality, alienation, and ecological fragility. Intensive industrial growth, uncontrolled urban expansion, and an unquestioning reliance on technology produced environmental and social consequences that the utopia of progress had failed to foresee, although artists such as Piero Gilardi sensed them early on. With the decline of the grand narratives of modernity and the emergence of postmodernism, the future ceased to appear as a shared promise and became an unstable territory, often represented through dystopian or paradoxical scenarios.
Over recent decades, global traumatic events have further eroded confidence in the future. Wars, financial crises, environmental disasters, pandemics, and renewed geopolitical conflicts have exposed the systemic vulnerability of contemporary societies. In this context, narratives of the future oscillate between renewed techno-optimism—which entrusts digital and scientific innovation with solving every problem—and nostalgic retreats into identity, tradition, and models of the past.
FUTURAMA interprets this condition as a manifestation of the paradox of hypermodernity: an age marked by constant acceleration, information overload, and rapid transformation, generating both enthusiasm and anxiety, boundless possibility and a pervasive sense of lost control. The exhibition introduces the notion of a “nostalgia for the future”: an emotional tension in which the desire for a better tomorrow endures despite the uncertainties of the present. What is missed is not the past itself, but the twentieth century’s confidence in change and its capacity to imagine the future as a collective horizon.
By bringing together utopian visions, aesthetics of progress, and critical perspectives on the contemporary condition, FUTURAMA opens a shared space for reflection. Rather than simply diagnosing a crisis of imagination, it invites visitors to reactivate the possibility of conceiving plural, desirable, and conscious futures, restoring to the future its role as a horizon to be collectively imagined and constructed.

Artists
Valerio Adami, Vincenzo Agnetti, Getulio Alviani, Enrico Baj, Agostino Bonalumi, Davide Boriani, Achille e Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, Fabrizio Dusi, Mario Schifano, Lucio Fontana, Piero Gilardi, Pietro Gallina, Gianni Colombo, Sergio Lombardo, Gino Marotta, Germana Marucelli, Pino Pascali, Alberto Rosselli, Paolo Scheggi, Giulio Turcato, Grazia Varisco
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue featuring essays by Carlo Antonelli, Paolo Campiglio, Michela Gattermayer, and Silvia Casagrande.
