From 2 March to 21 July 2024, Casa Museo dell’Antiquariato di Arezzo, which belongs to Intesa Sanpaolo, will be open to the public with the exhibition “La libera maniera. Abstract and informal art in the Intesa Sanpaolo collections”, organised and promoted by Intesa Sanpaolo, Fondazione Ivan Bruschi and Fondazione CR Jesi, in partnership with Gallerie d’Italia.
The exhibition - curated by Marco Bazzini, one of the most well-known scholars of today’s figurative culture - draws on the prestigious Intesa Sanpaolo collections within the framework of an effective collaboration which was also activated with the two Foundations in 2023 and launches an innovative exhibition itinerary in two legs, first in Arezzo and then in Jesi, from 7 December 2024 to 5 May 2025.
The exhibition consists of a rational selection of thirty-four works, which form the central nucleus of the two legs, and considers the period between the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the swinging Sixties in Italy. Just over a decade, during which the country rebuilt itself, leaving behind the material ruins of the cities, the economy and civil society and beginning, in what can be imagined as an abandoned and uncultivated territory, the reconstruction of a cultural awareness which had suffered heavily from the restrictions imposed during the twenty years of Fascist rule.
Italy was reborn in the Fifties, and it was at this time that the Republic was formed and the arts were reawakened, with numerous experiences that didn’t fail to arouse heated argument. The debate driven by opposing fronts with different political - and also poetic - orientations, offered proof of the real vitality and recovery of Italian art.
The exhibition in Arezzo
The exhibition starts with a presentation of that brief abstract experience between the two wars, with artists like Alberto Magnelli and Corrado Cagli, and then opens up to a liberality of approaches, hence the title of the exhibition “La libera maniera”, also paying tribute to Giorgio Vasari in the 450th anniversary of his death, which look towards poly-material art, as in the works of Alberto Burri, or new dimensions, as in those of Lucio Fontana, Edmondo Bacci and Gino Morandis.
In the exhibition space of Casa Bruschi, works by young artists move towards experiences in discovery of the sign, with Carla Accardi, Achille Perilli and Antonio Sanfilippo (also exponents of the Forma group), as well as the gesture, like the revolutionary gesture of Emilio Vedova. Alternatively, they approach a tangible reality that extends beyond every extraction from what is real, as sought by the Movimento Arte Concreta, represented in the exhibition by Gillo Dorfles, Bruno Munari, Atanasio Soldati and Gianni Monnet. And then there are those such as Birolli and Morlotti who look at nature with dense painted surfaces or, by contrast, those who examine the atomic universe of both the micro and macro cosmos, Enrico Baj and Guido Biasi. Women are part of this new dimension too, with a strongly independent sensitivity, and in addition to the works of Accardi, those of Carol Rama, Renata Boero, Regina and Paola Levi Montalcini are on display.
Lastly, a nucleus of artists who learned their art during this period and who, from these beginnings, leapt beyond the Informal to lead the research of the decade that followed, in which new pictorial dimensions were conquered: Toti Scialoja, Gastone Novelli, Mario Nigro and Enrico Castellani.
The exhibition in Jesi
Venue: Palazzo Bisaccioni, Piazza Colocci 4, Jesi
Dates: 7 December 2024 – 5 May 2025
Watch the backstage video of the exhibition
