From Sironi to Picasso's homage to Guernica: here is the 2022 program of the MAN of Nuoro

MAN in Nuoro, the Sardinian city’s contemporary art museum led by new director Chiara Gatti, has announced its exhibition program throughout 2022. It promises to be a schedule dedicated to great artists: for the summer of 2022 a major exhibition, SENSORAMA, dedicated to the theme of gaze and perception, vision and illusion, with works by historical and contemporary masters, from Magritte to Liu Bolin, and with installations that will modify the museum’s spaces, as well as experimental cinematography from the 1920s and 1930s, from Duchamp to Man Ray, among the first artists to “augment reality.” In the fall, alongside the presentation of new acquisitions destined to enrich the permanent collection, including a historic work by Mario Sironi, a major tribute to Picasso is announced for the 70th anniversary of the exhibition of Guernica in Italy. That was in 1953. MAN will tell the genesis of this masterpiece. Here is the full schedule of exhibitions below.

July 8-October 30, 2022
SENSORAMA. The Gaze, Things, Deceptions. From Magritte to augmented reality
curated by Chiara Gatti and Tiziana Cipelletti
with the scientific contribution of Baingio Pinna, Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Sassari, author of the book “La percezione visiva,” il Mulino, 2021
Exhibition design by Denis Santachiara

SENSORAMA adopts the “Museum of Illusions” model in an educated and original way and entrusts the works of contemporary artists and videomakers to explore the relationship between Vision and Perception with the aim of showing the complexity of cognitive phenomena and the “pleasure” of being deceived. Illusion is our reality. Because of the world out there, we see the little that our eyes are able to see and add to it what the brain wants us to believe. The result is a representation of things that is not real at all.

MAN, which has always been dedicated to research and different languages of the contemporary, inaugurates a new exhibition season that aims to reflect on some themes prompted by the drama of the pandemic and imprisonment: interrupted communication, the gaze veiled by the diaphragm of a screen, the reading of images taken from sight and returned in a virtual reality. To return to looking, to train the eyes and to ask questions about the authenticity of vision is the purpose of an exhibition that, starting from historical antecedents, noble fathers of a painting of truth and deception, such as René Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico, opens the spectrum to the most recent aesthetic investigations into perception or appearance.

SENSORAMA aims to represent the degree zero of perception, useful to “clean up” the gaze, to return to wonder at the paradoxes of vision, to begin again to observe works with an inquiring gaze, to approach images aware of a fluid boundary between real and virtual, but ready to sharpen our eyesight to unveil the mechanisms that orchestrate the very process of vision. An invitation to learn to look but above all to doubt.

SENSORAMA is also cinema, an artificial art par excellence, a “factory of illusions” since its inception and a ground for visual experimentation by the avant-garde. It starts from the fantastic cinematography of George Méliès based on the disappearance of objects achieved with a primitive stop frame, to the phantasmagorical interactions between artistic avant-gardes (Man Ray, Duchamp, Hans Richter) and cinema.

May 2022 and spring 2023
OPEN CALL. Return to Monte Verità - Residency for young Sardinian artists extra moenia

The Residency competition offers young Sardinian artists the opportunity to conduct a research project as guests of a foreign institution twinned with MAN. This is an agreement that will see an important triangulation implemented between cultural venues, specifically MAN Museum in Nuoro,

Monte Verità Foundation of Ascona (CH) and Museo Novecento of Florence. A convocation open to all emerging and active authors in the panorama of Sardinia called to present their curriculum and the synopsis of a project to be completed during a three-week residency at Monte Verità, an extraordinary cultural coterie of the early twentieth century (rediscovered and studied by the great Harald Szeemann), a crossroads of the major artistic and intellectual personalities of the last century, to which the young artists will be asked to devote an in-depth study on site. Conversely, MAN will host artists selected by the foreign institution who will conduct, conversely, in the territory a work resulting from a reflection on themes proposed by the Museum and related to local identity. The residency will be coordinated by visiting professors and enriched by lectures by prominent authors on the Italian scene.

November 18, 2022 - February 19, 2023
Welcome to the Collection. Mario Sironi, Costantino Nivola, Maria Lai, Jorge Eielson and Giovanni Campus and the new series “I quaderni del MAN”

The important entry into the collection of Mario Sironi’s work Mother Sewing, 1905-1906, the result of a recent purchase by MAN, is an opportunity to present to the public the latest acquisitions received in the form of purchase, loan or donation. An exhibition aligns the new arrivals within a narrative that places them in the collection, explaining their value and role within the identity of the collection.

Sironi’s work will be accompanied by a critical text edited by Elena Pontiggia. A museum series “I quaderni del MAN” designed for dossier exhibitions will be created for the occasion. Nivola’s Times Square work will land in the collection in the aftermath of a significant restoration and will be the focus of a lunge into the intricacies of his celebrated New York subject.

Nov. 18, 2022-Feb. 19, 2023
Picasso and Guernica. Genesis of a Masterpiece 70 years after the exhibition in Italy. 1953 - 2023
Curated by Michele Tavola

From September 23 to December 31, 1953, Guernica was exhibited in the (bombed) Sala delle Cariatidi of the Palazzo Reale in Milan, along with more than three hundred works by the Spanish master, shaping the largest Picasso retrospective ever held in Italy. Later, the exhibition was moved to Rome, but in a reduced format and, above all, without Guernica, which has never traveled to our country since.

Today Guernica no longer travels, never leaving Spain and its hall at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. It will never again return to Paris, where it was created, commissioned by the Spanish Republican government for the 1937 World’s Fair; it will never return to MoMA in New York, where it spent much of its exile before reintroducing itself to its homeland. Seventy years after the historic exhibition at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, MAN celebrates the Italian passage of this masterpiece.

The itinerary is divided into two sections: the echoes of Guernica in Picasso’s artistic production and the story of the genesis of the work through the visual narrative of Dora Maar, photographer and at the time companion of the Spanish artist.

The first section finds its main focus in the extraordinary diptych of engravings entitled Sueño y mentira de Franco, the true graphic counterbalance to the great painting, around which will be gathered a significant selection of engravings and drawings related to the gestation of Guernica or made in the same period, which closely recall its style and themes. The second soul of the exhibition will revolve around the testimony of Dora Maar, who documented Picasso’s work day by day with her own photographs. This is a series of moving shots that are fundamental to the philological reconstruction of the creation of Guernica. There will be no shortage of images taken in 1953 on the occasion of the Milan exhibition, in the touching setting of the Sala delle Cariatidi marked by the bombings, a tragic situation that convinced Picasso to exhibit his masterpiece in that context so akin to the painting’s soul.

october 2022 and spring 2023
WORKSHOP. memoREactive memoREactive.

Artistic experience, acknowledged or concealed in small towns, archaeological evidence, fragments of natural and compromised landscape from industrial land use, historic or unauthorized architecture, literary or expressive forms of all kinds: all of these can create a reservoir of entropic cultural energy. An Infosphere, that is, a compendium of information available for deconstruction and recomposition, intellectually and artistically synaesthetic. The museum, by its very nature, preserves and nurtures memory. Layered memory, as well as the memory of the present. Thus, within it, these materials can constitute useful elements for the preparation of new narratives of the territory. One wants to imagine a new topological meaning of the external dimension of the museum, a diffuse punctuation, a dilated network whose nodes are constituted by places or cultural centralities (evident or less recognized) considered significant. From these points can take those stresses and inferences with which to undertake a new cross-reading. A superstructural layer with which to represent a certain image, deep, authentic and unconventional, of the Sardinian cultural landscape that will be the subject of an invitation-only workshop for young artists, photographers and architects, united by a common project and coordinated by a staff of teachers selected thanks to an agreement between MAN, University of Palermo, Polo Territoriale Universitario di Agrigento and University of Cagliari.

november - december 2022
EDUCATIONAL. Deledda Reboot
As part of the celebrations for the 150th anniversary of Grazia Deledda’s birth.

The MAN Museum joins the project of the Province of Nuoro for the Celebrations of 150 years since the birth of Grazia Deledda. It is proposing a workshop to “design a story” that will set up a series of lessons reserved for creative youngsters, called upon to interact with great Italian authors, letting themselves be inspired by art in stories experienced among the museum’s own rooms. The coordination entrusted to the educational services of the MAN Museum will be enriched by the presence of names in contemporary literature called upon to stimulate the creativity and narrative vocation of young writers.

november 2022 - february 2023
stop-motion. introduction to contemporary art history for adults

The course, held in the halls of MAN by the museum team, aims to address the panorama of contemporary art in Italy and the world, ranging from the experiences of the 1950s to the latest generation of research. The introduction will go hand in hand with a reflection on the evolution of languages, the experimentation with new media, the mutations of the relationship between author and artwork, but also between artwork and audience. Current issues will be touched upon, such as the anthropological implication of recent studies, the dialogue between past and present, following the widespread motto “all art is contemporary.” There will be no shortage of lunges into problems of conservation and restoration of contemporary techniques.

From Sironi to Picasso's homage to Guernica: here is the 2022 program of the MAN of Nuoro

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