The MAN presents an extraordinary, unique and unrepeatable event. In fact, the forty masterpieces that make up this exhibition, belonging to the collections of the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, are normally exhibited to the public of the Roman Museum in the second twentieth century sector of the Gallery and constitute one of its most important nuclei.
In fact, they offer an exceptional testimony to the artistic expressions that characterized the Italian culture of the fifties and sixties, when, having now overcome the contrast between figuration – realism and abstraction – cuboexpressionism in the name of a new abstractionism, the figurative poetics embody the desire to create a new language completely free from tradition, free to express the reality of the sign, the reality of the gesture, the reality of the matter.
The term “informal”, used by critics for almost all the artists who appear here, and in reality applicable only to some of them, nevertheless indicates the distance now taken even by those who are not exactly young with respect to the commonly understood artistic form. Form that includes space, line, color and the arrival at personal, private languages, in which the deepest needs of the spirit and intellect seek the most immediate expressive medium in new or newly understood materials: thus the holes are born and then the cuts by Fontana, bags, irons and plastics by Burri, the assemblies of metal elements by Colla, the “fork” acronym by Capogrossi, the painted action by Vedova, to name just a few of the best-known names. These are the fruits of an intense season of experiences and critical debates involving not only the artists present here, but also passionate militant critics such as Lionello Venturi, Nello Ponente, Emilio Villa, Giovanni Testori and others.
Italian art, driven by a real need to break with the past and aimed at conquering a new and diversified universe of representation, comes to give life to one of the best and least provincial periods, compared to Europe and the United States of ‘America, of the artistic culture of the second half of the 20th century. More than an exhibition, this exhibition could be defined as a slice of the Museum made available to another public Museum, which an extraordinary circumstance, such as the hospitality that this year the National Gallery gives to the XIV edition of the Rome Quadrennial, has made possible.
This is a cultural operation of great importance for the National Gallery, which thus manages, with the full collaboration of the MAN of Nuoro, to raise awareness even “outside the walls”, and according to a method that now has a consolidated tradition, portions of the heritage of works of art that it protects and manages on behalf of the State and which therefore belongs to everyone.
The exhibition, enthusiastically granted by the Superintendent of the National Gallery Maria Vittoria Marini Clarelli, is curated by Mariastella Margozzi with Maura Picciau. The catalog contains introductory essays by the curators on the historical period presented, on the movements and artists, on the history of the works and authors intertwined with the events of the National Gallery.
The artists: Carla Accardi, Afro, Alberto Burri, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Ettore Colla, Pietro Consagra, Piero Dorazio, Lucio Fontana, Gastone Novelli, Achille Perilli, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Antonio Sanfilippo, Toti Scialoja, Tancredi (Parmeggiani), Giulio Turcato, Cy Twombly, Emilio Widow.
Edited by Mariastella Margozzi with Maura Picciau.
