Archive of Regina Cassolo Bracchi, Italy's first avant-garde sculptor, is born

An initiative to highlight one of the most interesting Italian artists of the 20th century: Regina Cassolo Bracchi (Mede, 1894 - Milan, 1974). After the first major Italian museum retrospective presented at the GAMeC in Bergamo in 2021, following the parallel acquisition by the Centre Pompidou in Paris of a significant nucleus of the artist’s works, and after returning to prominence in 2022 on the occasion of the 59. International Art Exhibition in Venice, the intellectual legacy of Regina Cassolo Bracchi finds representation in the association named after her, called "Archivio Regina Cassolo Bracchi."

Founded on the initiative of Gaetano and Zoe Fermani, with the scientific support of Paolo Campiglio, Chiara Gatti and Lorenzo Giusti, the Archivio Regina is a cultural association created with the aim of studying, cataloging and promoting the art of Regina Cassolo Bracchi at the Italian and foreign levels, taking care of the protection of her name, her artistic production and the documentation related to it, through the certification and archiving of her general work, as well as the creation of a catalog raisonné.

Regina Cassolo Bracchi was the first sculptor of the Italian historical avant-garde. She was a futurist in her formative years and a radical abstractionist in her full maturity. She was the first woman in twentieth-century Italy to use experimental materials, such as tin, aluminum, iron wire, tin, and sandpaper. And also the first artist in Italy to hang floating geometries in the air made of plastic fragments, Plexiglass, perspex or rhodoid. Innovative in manner and intuition, she maintained that the project and the idea were superior, in their larval originality, to the finished work. “I choose themes of such simplicity, such elementary constructions that they could be reproduced by anyone based on my exact description,” she said.

Yet history had forgotten her. Like many women in early 20th-century art, Regina had remained on the fringes of the manuals. A female case in the shadow of the masters, although her name appeared at the foot of Futurist manifestos (she signed the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Aeroplastics in 1934) and although she was noticed by André Breton and Léonce Rosenberg, who, after a Parisian meeting in 1937, offered her a contract with his gallery, which she renounced to return to Italy.

Critics have often absentmindedly omitted her presence from the chronicles, despite the fact that Regina played a leading role as the only woman in the Italian MAC, the Movimento Arte Concreta (founded in 1948), always active in contacts with the leadership of the French group “Espace” (born in 1951). Her theoretical mind animated, in fact, the cultural liveliness of the post-World War II period, involved in the artistic debate by her friend Bruno Munari, who knew her at the time of the Futurist adventure and then wanted her at his side in the world of Concrete Art.

Committed to the registry of the complete corpus of Regina Cassolo Bracchi’s works, including sculptures, drawings, maquettes, and notebooks, the Archivio Regina is launching an appeal to census specimens that to date are not known or not catalogued, in order to constitute a database offered for consultation to scholars and students, with a view to an ever-increasing and in-depth knowledge and dissemination of the artist’s research.

The Regina Archive consists of the artist’s bequest to Gaetano and Zoe Fermani, members of the scientific committee alongside Paolo Campiglio, professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Pavia, Lorenzo Giusti, director of the GAMeC in Bergamo, and Chiara Gatti, director of the MAN in Nuoro. Upcoming international events that will see Regina’s presence include: the new installation at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which will reserve a room of the itinerary to the story of the MAC group and its twinning with the French group “Espace,” starting precisely with Regina’s works that have recently arrived in the collection; and the publication, edited by Alessandro Giammei and Ara Merjian, of the monographic volume devoted to modern sculpture in Italy, Fragments of Totality, published by Yale University Press.

The archive can be consulted by appointment and is based in Milan at 57 Via Marcantonio Colonna. For info: +39 340 4626900, archivioregina.it, info@archivioregina.it

Archive of Regina Cassolo Bracchi, Italy's first avant-garde sculptor, is born

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