“Painting is back”: the exhibition season starts again at the Gallerie d’Italia (Intesa Sanpaolo museum in Milan)
Galleries of Italy, museum of Intesa Sanpaolo, reopens the exhibition season with “Paiting is back. Eighties, painting in Italy “ at its headquarters in Piazza Scala from 2 June to 3 October. The exhibition offers a first investigation of the protagonists of that decade, who provocatively understood painting as a happy and rapacious ability to paint the world of images with a new vitality and who, immediately, had international visibility and an almost overwhelming fame. The exhibition is dedicated to the new generations and proceeds by depths of the transversality experienced by the artists in those years.
Giovanni Bazoli, President Emeritus of Intesa Sanpaolo, he claims: “We are pleased to open the Gallerie d’Italia the exhibition ‘Painting is back’, a fascinating review that presents the painting of the Eighties in Italy, combining important works from other prestigious collections with masterpieces owned by Intesa Sanpaolo. On many occasions, our Bank has firmly reaffirmed the belief that cultural and artistic heritage can be a precious lever for initiating the rebirth of the country. The new exhibition, in the difficult time we are still experiencing, is dedicated to a season of Italian art that transmits a sign of confidence in the future. Intesa Sanpaolo, aware of the importance of the civil mission entrusted to museum institutions, has intensified its commitment to strengthening the role of the Gallerie d’Italia as places destined to foster the social and cultural growth of our communities.”
This exhibition starts with works between 1977 and 1980 by Gino De Dominicis, Luigi Ontani e Mimmo Paladino, to attest to a creative freedom that has its roots in the Italian visual tradition and, without complexes, interprets it also through the drawing, the photographic support up to the revival of a monumental video-installation of 1984, THE SWIMMER (goes to Heidelberg too often), of Studio Azzurro. The Eighties no longer understood as the orthodoxy of movements but as the reconstruction of an open dialogue between the protagonists of the time, where authors such as Mario Merz, master of the rediscovery of the great myths of humanity, or Carol Rama, with a visionary and sensitive painting linked to his own subjectivity.
Fundamental works of Sandro Chia as the Painter 1978 and, in the development of the exhibition in a sort of counterpoint, paintings by Mimmo Germanà together with Ernesto Tatafiore. Francesco Clemente presents historical works such as the 1980’s Untitled Intesa Sanpaolo collection; while in the course of these years Nicola De Maria tackles mural painting and the great poetic themes that go hand in hand with the irreverent and playful compositions of Aldo Spoldi and the articulated path of Enzo Cucchi, which ideally opens the exhibition with The Stigmata (1980).
With counterparts of a transversal nature, of that middle linked to the great experiments and “other” Milanese culture, the exhibition also accounts for the return to Italy of protagonists of those years such as Mimmo Rotella O Valerio Adami or of that figure of great intellectual, translator and critic that he was Emilio Tadini.
Ad Enrico Baj the exhibition dedicates an entire room built on four rare paintings by Intesa Sanpaolo collection, made between the fifties and sixties, which accompany the visitor in a maturation of the pictorial language and the creative mechanism of the artist, to then lead him to the spectacular The world of ideas: a canvas 19 meters long, spray painted, almost a contemporary graffiti executed in 1983 and today of surprising relevance.
Simultaneously with the exhibition, a special issue of the magazine “Flash Art” will be published and distributed, which in a new capacity will bring together articles, interviews, documents related to the artists on display and which will restore the critical wealth of those eighties of which, as a of the fundamental tools of international Italian artistic culture.
The volume accompanying the exhibition intends to collect the cultural climate of those years and will contain the images of the works on display, some talking iconographic comparisons and historical documents precede the curator’s essay. Luca Massimo Barbero, with the interventions of Cristina Beltrami, Michele Bonuomo, Maria Luisa Frisa, Chiara Mari, Luca Scarlini and of Studio Azzurro for an insight into the vitality, not only of the visual arts, but also of new media, the world of fashion, creativity and theater.