2024-01-10 16:42:35
Thirty-four works that tell the creative universe of one of the main interpreters of magical realism in Italy. Landscapes, still lifes, portraits, indoor and outdoor figures, circus and vaudeville characters. Paintings that represent the main nucleus of the research activity of the Roman painter Antonio Donghi which can be admired in Rome in the exhibition curated by Fabio Benzi, ‘Antonio Donghi. The magic of silence’, set up from 9 February to 26 May in the spaces of Palazzo Merulana. Considered one of the greatest representatives of magical realism in our country, Antonio Donghi, born in Rome in 1897 and died in the capital in 1963, after a long silence on the part of critics, was rediscovered, impressing scholars and the public starting from the 1980s . His works are therefore now included in most international exhibitions on the 1920s and 1930s.
The exhibition presents works mainly purchased directly at the major exhibitions of the time (Venice Biennials, Rome Quadrennials) or otherwise found on the market. The exhibition project presents the most significant nuclei coming from the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art of Rome, the National Gallery of Modern Art, the Bank of Italy, the UniCredit Art Collection and the Elena and Claudio Cerasi Foundation, which together represent the entire path of the artist, touching on all the main themes. In particular, the exhibition offers one of the main pictorial nuclei represented in the Elena and Claudio Cerasi Foundation which owns and permanently exhibits three fundamental Donghian masterpieces: ‘The Washerwomen’ (1922-23), the master’s first ever masterpiece; ‘Boat Trip’ (1934); ‘Little Acrobats’ (1938).
Three particularly iconic paintings (La Pollarola, Portrait of Lauro De Bosis, Annunciation), linked in different ways to the Cerasi collection, are instead included outside the scope of public collections. Works that allow visitors to reconstruct Donghi’s artistic journey by measuring themselves with his working method and entering the artist’s ‘workshop’. A painter who, in his creations, proposes a climate suspended due to the density of questions he asks the viewer, despite the naked reality in which the anonymous protagonists of the paintings are presented.
Donghi is a Roman painter in his nature and in the culture of the time, as also emerges from the landscapes of the city and its surroundings. With his art he contributed to the development of that perspective of rediscovering traditional roots, rather than following a path of avant-garde formal deconstruction. The exhibition is curated by Fabio Benzi, who curated the study-exhibition ‘Giacomo Balla, from abstract Futurism to iconic Futurism’ in 2019 for the same Palazzo Merulana museum. The exhibition was created thanks to the support of the Main Sponsor UniCredit, which also contributed with sixteen important loans of Donghi’s works, coming from the collection exhibited at Palazzo De Carolis, the banking group’s representative office in Rome, and is produced by CoopCulture.
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