AN UNEXPECTED COLLECTION

“AN UNEXPECTED COLLECTION. A journey through contemporary painting and sculpture”, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, Associated Curator of the Intesa Sanpaolo Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art, is a temporary exhibition itinerary that explores previously unseen aspects of artists and works from the Group's twentieth and twenty-first century collections, including the Luigi and Peppino Agrati collection - now part of the artistic heritage managed by the Group -, the sculptural works formerly belonging to the Henraux collection, and recent acquisitions from the Ubi Banca Group. With more than 70 works not usually on display at the Milan venue, this itinerary dedicated to Italian and international contemporary art will focus on the dialogue between the varying sculptural research of some of the leading exponents of the 20th century in comparison with important insights into post-World War II painting. In the monumental entrance area of the museum, visitors will be greeted by the large white marble work Femme Paysage by Jean Hans Arp, created in 1966, representing the extensive collection of sculptures from the Henraux Collection now belonging to Intesa Sanpaolo. The exhibition with chronological roots starting with the great masters of 20th century sculpture, destined to mark the figurative production of the Italian plastic arts, will allow visitors to admire in the first rooms three great 20th century artists - Arturo Martini, Marino Marini and Giacomo Manzù - with works rarely exhibited together and gathered here as emblematic of the roots of Italian sculpture. A completely unprecedented moment will be the room dedicated to Fausto Melotti, where an important fictile corpus by the master (19 works representing his ceramic containers and vases, including four important Korai, two works in copper wire, one of which comes from the Luigi and Peppino Agrati collection) will be displayed for the first time. Thanks to the gahtering of various collections, there will be a room dedicated entirely to Lucio Fontana as a clear reference to the theme of Spatialism, a room devoted to zeroing and monochrome in international contemporary art from the early 1960s, the pivotal piece of which will be Sol LeWitt's sculpture Complex Form, recently added to the Intesa Sanpaolo Collections, together with Italian artists of the calibre of Piero Manzoni, Alberto Burri, Toti Scialoja, Enrico Castellani and Robert Ryman, the master of American minimalism. The exhibition also includes emblematic artists like Carla Accardi, Giulio Turcato, Antonio Sanfilippo and Corrado Cagli, and a nucleus of sculptures by Pietro Consagra, including the work Bifrontale malachite, dedicated to the theme of research into stone and marble conducted by the artist in the 1970s and 1980s. The exhibition itinerary envisages in the transition to the Cantiere del '900 an ideal thematic and visual telescope with works by artists who, starting from classical abstraction, get to an increasingly minimal and procedural painting in the post-World War II period: also on display artists of the calibre of Bice Lazzari, Mario Nigro and Roman Opalka. Some of the studies on display will touch on Sol LeWitt's poetic and performance methods. This American master's important sculpture Three Cubes (Straight), dated 1969, which has just been added to the Intesa Sanpaolo Collections, will take on almost the appearance of an architectural staircase as it enters the space of the Salone Manzoni, whose perspective, made up of cubic profiles, will frame the point of arrival of this itinerary, represented by the recent acquisition of Gerhard Richter's Abstraktes Bild dated 1984. The itinerary will provide an opportunity to explore and promote the many themes, lines of research and movements characterizing the Intesa Sanpaolo Collections.