Time.news – On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birth, the Maxxi, National Museum of 21st Century Arts, celebrates Giacomo Balla with an exceptional project: theopening to the public for the first time of its incredible futurist house in via Oslavia in Rome, total work of art, and one exhibition at Maxxi which highlights his extraordinary contemporaneity and connects him with eight contemporary artists who were inspired by him.
The ‘Casa Balla. From the home to the universe and back ‘, curated by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, director of Maxxi Arte, and Domitilla Dardi, curator for the Maxxi Design, opens to the public in two moments: it starts tomorrow with the exhibition at Maxxi while the house of Via Oslavia, where the artist lived until his death with his wife Elisa and daughters Elica and Luce, will be open on weekends starting from Friday 25 June.
In the visit to the Balla house, the first surprise arrives already in front of the door, with the FuturBalla plate / signature, promise of wonders and surprises that will reveal themselves by immersing themselves in the futurist artist’s home-universe: from the famous red Studiolo, to the rooms of the daughters Luce and Elica, from the kitchen to the suggestive bathroom.
Balla House
An anonymous and bourgeois apartment that the Balla family transforms into a real work of art, an experimental laboratory made up of painted walls and doors, decorated furniture and furnishings, self-made tools, paintings and sculptures, clothes designed and sewn at home.
Balla House
A house full of light, color and movement that reflects the ideas of the manifesto on the Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe signed by Balla and Fortunato Depero in 1915 but which goes even further.
For Balla, futurist dynamism translates into continuous creation. And his house becomes a workshop, a sort of ancient Renaissance workshop where objects of different kinds designed and built by him for use in everyday life (tables, chairs, shelves, trestles, plates, tiles), poor in materials but very rich in the creative vein, they coexist with paintings, drawings, sculptures.
Balla House
Some important works preserved there, including preparatory drawings and sketches recently restored by the Special Superintendence of Rome and exhibited partly in the house and partly at the MAXXI, testify to the different phases of the Turin artist’s research, from an initial figurative period between the two centuries to the futurist aesthetics and ideology of the 1910s (such as the 3 large panels of Le mani del popolo italiano) to a return, finally, to the pure representation of reality in the last part of his life.
House dances
Casa Balla also collects several paintings by the daughters Luce and Elica, who lived there and kept it until the 1990s. Protected by a protection restriction since 2004, in the same year it underwent an initial restoration while further safety measures were carried out in 2018 by the Bank of Italy in collaboration with the Special Superintendence of Rome.
Balla House
“‘Casa Balla. From the house to the universe and back’ it is a total project as total was the idea of art of the futurist master “, says Giovanna Melandri, president of Maxxi . “Balla’s apartment in the heart of the Vittoria district in Rome enhances his kaleidoscopic and experimental universe. A 360-degree vision of art that is surprisingly current and of great inspiration for today’s creative communities”.
For Bartolomeo Pietromarchi “Casa Balla is a new and important stage in the great work of Maxxi, aimed at enhancing and reinterpreting the contemporary historical and artistic heritage. Giacomo Balla’s house, after 30 years of closure, finally comes back to light with its decorations, furniture , works of art expresses the artist’s personality in all its forms and represents one of his greatest masterpieces. Through the reopening of the Futurist Master’s home we recover a part of our DNA, one of the greatest art stories of the twentieth century che has forever changed the way of doing, conceiving and living artistic practice “.
Domitilla Dardi, curator of the project, observes that “the one imagined by Balla and her daughters is a modernity that today is very familiar to us: it speaks of overcoming disciplinary barriers and above all of identification between art and life. They lived their art seamlessly and this is what makes theirs a ‘widespread project’ that concerns both paintings and everyday dishes, sculptures, furnishings, carpets, but also clothes they wore becoming self-propelled works of art “.
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