A merry-go-round of creatures enlivens Enrico Baj's exhibition at Milan's Palazzo Reale

Presented today the exhibition BAJ. BajchezBaj visitable from October 8, 2024 to February 9, 2025 in Milan ’s Palazzo Reale in the Sala delle Cariatidi curated by Chiara Gatti and Roberta Cerini Baj. The exhibition celebrates Enrico Baj (Milan, Oct. 31, 1924 - Vergiate, June 16, 2003), one of the masters of the Italian and international neo-avant-garde, with a star retrospective of the autumn exhibitions, designed to cover all the themes and subjects of his long and multifaceted experience. Baj returns exactly 100 years after his birth and 12 years after the exhibition, in the same room as I Funerali dell’anarchico Pinelli.

Promoted by Comune di Milano-Cultura and produced by Palazzo Reale with Electa, the project has nearly fifty works distilled in a time span from the early 1950s to the 2000s, traversing the artist’s phases of adherence to different movements over time: from Dadaism and Surrealism toInformal art, from his closeness to the Nordic Co.Br.A group to the genesis of the Nuclear art movement, which Baj founded in Milan with Sergio Dangelo in 1951. Starting from the gestural abstraction of his early days, passing through the birth of his larval anthropomorphic figures and the eruption of liquefied mountains into the magmatic body of the Generals, we touch on the parody of extraterrestrial invasions to arrive at the Meccano army and the animated world of chests of drawers and trumeaus.

The installation, designed by Umberto Zanetti, ZDA Zanetti Design Architettura with the technical sponsorship of UniFor for the fittings, is designed to harmonize the artist’s works and the evocative historical context of one of the Palace’s best-known rooms: with a play of mirrors enhanced by the colors and the mirrors themselves made by the master, takes place in the space with site-specific solutions, as in the case of the three hundred silhouettes of theApocalypse or the eight sculptures from the Meccano series , arranged like a regiment on parade. Welcoming visitors to the Hall of the Skylight is the scenographic reconstruction of theApocalypse, an assemblage of imaginary and dreamlike figures in a polyptych of nearly 100 square meters, set up high as if to evoke an apse, ideally inspired by Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, here dotted with clumsy and mocking demons, climbing and screaming up to the ceiling.

Following this introduction are Nuclear Works, Ultrabodies, Parades, The Funeral of the Anarchist Pinelli, Generals, Meccanoes, Furniture, Mirrors and Dames. To mark the centenary of the Milanese artist’s birth, an exhibition dedicated to Baj’s ceramic work throughout its historical and chronological development, curated by Luca Bochicchio, opens Oct. 8. Also under the title BAJ. Baj chez Baj is open at the Museum of Ceramics in Savona, with a section also at MuDA - Museo Diffuso Albisola in Albissola Marina, in the venues of the Exhibition Center and Casa Museo Jorn. The scientific collaboration between Milan and Savona, between the curators and institutions involved aspires to draw two autonomous but complementary itineraries, capable of paying tribute to Baj’s eclectic genius, documented in the single catalog, published by Electa, in which the two exhibition itineraries unravel among places, forms, materials and encounters, tracing the fascinating cosmogony of Baj, an epiphany of intelligence and creativity. Electa also dedicates to Baj a volume of its A-Z series, a series of monographic lemmaries that recounts eclectic figures of the 20th century.

A merry-go-round of creatures enlivens Enrico Baj's exhibition at Milan's Palazzo Reale

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