An exhibition in Prato to rediscover Quinto Ghermandi, 20th century sculptor

From Dec. 3, 2022 to Feb. 25, 2023, the Open Art Gallery in Prato presents the exhibition La Forma delle Cose by Quinto Ghermandi (Crevalcore, 1916 - San Lazzaro di Savena, 1994), an anomalous artist who traversed the theater of plastic forms with determination and subtle irony for more than four decades. The exhibition is accompanied by a monograph curated by Mauro Stefanini with a text by Beatrice Buscaroli, which reconstructs for the first time Quinto Ghermandi’s entire critical career, through his participation in the Venice Biennale, international exhibitions, awards, collections, works of art installed in public spaces and the important experience of Villa Baldissera in Pianoro.

From the Babel of languages, Ghermandi emerges slowly, after a training that sees him a pupil of two masters (Cleto Tomba first, Ercole Drei later) who love shaping matter, immersing their hands in it with physical pleasure. The terracotta and ceramics of his early creative years are indebted to that teaching; a taste, a pleasantness that in reality will never abandon Ghermandi. Just as he will not abandon the taste for trying his hand at the seemingly less “noble” trials of thematic representations of carnival floats in San Giovanni in Persiceto.

Sculptor in any case and always, even in the crucial passages of the 1960s, when the transition is made from the metamorphic images of a nature that seems to dissolve all immediacy to empirical references, where the naturalistic reference translates into vague reference to free the image in the “pure” plastic forms of the cycles of Leaves, Flights and Wings. In all likelihood Ghermandi was never won over by the solicitations of the “last naturalism” prophesied by Francesco Arcangeli: he experienced the informal climate as a conceptual cage that slowly but surely dissolves.

In his practice it is narrative time that is dilated; research aimed at identifying structures within which the “totemic” value of the image can be amplified; the construction of objects that cannot be consumed by the immediacy of perception. No return to the restlessness of a tormented, vital nature that escapes the certainties of reason, that oversteps the boundaries of conceptual definition in favor of unpredictability, of chance. But rather an effort aimed at eliminating all determinism, all formal “immediacy,” and, at the same time, an attempt to impose on the work a morphology that challenges every principle of geometric organization, every stability. His unstable objects live within an asymmetrical time; project, creation and perception only in the work can account for the “breath of things.”

The exhibition includes more than twenty sculptures, some of them large, all made in the 1950s and 1960s. The Open Art Gallery has been promoting Quinto Ghermandi’s work since 2001, when it began its activity, through group exhibitions, art fairs and publications dedicated to contemporary sculpture.

The exhibition is open Monday through Friday from 3 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., Saturday 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and 3 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., closed Sundays and holidays. Free admission. Catalog Edizioni Masso delle Fate, Florence, 2022, with extensive critical anthology and iconographic apparatus. For information: T. +39 0547 538003, galleria@openart.it, www.openart.it.

Quinto Ghermandi was born in Crevalcore (BO) in 1916. He attended the Liceo Artistico and the Accademia Belle Arti in Bologna. He took part in World War II as a paratrooper, was captured at El Alamein by the British and spent four years in concentration camps in Egypt and the Middle East. Returning from captivity, he devoted himself to caricature and made trips to Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam. After an initial period devoted to ceramics, he turned his attention to iron sculpture and later to lost-wax bronze. Notable among others are his participation in the Venice Biennale (1950, 1956, 1960, 1966), the Rome Quadrennial (1952, 1965, 1986) and the Mediterranean Biennale (Alexandria, 1963). Between 1954 and 1963 he made more than fifty informal sculptures for the villa and park of the collector Giona Cesare Baldissera in Pianoro (BO), an experience that positively influenced his artistic career. He is present at the most important sculpture exhibitions in Italy and abroad, winning numerous awards and recognition. His works are placed in public spaces and are present in the collections of numerous museums and institutions. He died in San Lazzaro di Savena (BO) in 1994.

Image: Quinto Ghermandi, Momento del Volo (1959; bronze, 50 x 45 x 15 cm)

An exhibition in Prato to rediscover Quinto Ghermandi, 20th century sculptor

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