It was 1978, when Achille Bonito Oliva defined the group of Italian artists made up of Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Nicola De Maria and Mimmo Paladino with the term Transavantgarde. Since then the term became “official” to define that movement which, shortly thereafter, would find international affirmation.
“Transavantgarde – wrote Bonito Oliva, summarizing the spirit of the movement – means openness towards the intentional failure of the logocentrism of Western culture, towards a pragmatism that restores space to the instinct of the work” and again “transavantgarde responded in contextual terms to the catastrophe generalization of history and culture, opening up towards a position of overcoming the pure materialism of techniques and new materials and arriving at the recovery of the out-of-dateness of painting, understood as the ability to restore to the creative process the character of an intense eroticism, the depth of a ‘image that does not deprive itself of the pleasure of representation and narration.”
The MAN of Nuoro, thanks to the curator Achille Bonito Oliva and the prestigious loan from the MART (which in 2002 acquired a large part of Alessandro Grassi’s important collection in storage, within which the nucleus dedicated to the Transavantgarde represents a moment of itself, extremely significant and homogeneous) presents a selection of approximately seventy works. The paintings that will be exhibited in the exhibition are works where the recovery of the pictorial technique goes beyond the more abstract and conceptual works that characterized artistic research in the Seventies. Grassi, in the choice of his works, deeply linked to colour, is guided by the heart, making impactful choices according to his interpretation of the meaning of collecting, which must be – he states – “done with simplicity and without frills”.
The collection thus marks a careful journey, through the works of the late seventies, dotted with some historical masterpieces. The artists propose a return to painting and sculpture, recovering the pictorial tradition in a citation key, sometimes ironic and other times aggressive, and thus affirm the freedom to return to the artistic “tradition”. The contemporary reinterpretation of figuration and lyrical abstraction is thus elaborated through careful meditation on the experiences of the historical avant-gardes of the 20th century.
Artists: Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Francesco de Maria, Mimmo Paladino.
