An exhibition on modern and contemporary Mino Trafeli in Volterra

From March 28 to October 15, 2025, the Palazzo dei Priori in Volterra is hosting a major exhibition dedicated to Mino Trafeli (Volterra, 1922 - 2018), curated by Marco Tonelli: Mino Trafeli: Being Modern/Becoming Contemporary 1968-1947 is, in particular, the third and concluding exhibition of a retrospective cycle that the City of Volterra, with the support of the Committee for the Public Enjoyment of the Artistic Heritage of Mino Trafeli, dedicates to the first sculptor from Volterra who made the decisive transition from figuration to modernity to postmodernism and the contemporaneity of plastic languages.

The city of Volterra is inseparable from the private and professional history of Mino Trafeli, the son and grandson of alabaster craftsmen and himself a workshop practitioner since childhood, who was able, however, to transcend the artisanal and popular culture without ever forgetting it, but rather using alabaster as a real sculptural material. He had already sensed this bond of blood and deep roots between the city of Volterra and the artist, in unsuspected times, Giovanni Fumagalli, Trafeli’s first gallery owner and founder of the historic Galleria delle Ore in Milan, where Trafeli exhibited almost continuously from 1957 to 1966), introducing him in a catalog in 1966: “It is certain that Volterra, this Etruscan city cut off (until when?) from the news, where the echoes of the intellectualistic chatter of the great metropolises come muffled and distant like echoes from another planet ... nourishes him like a mother ... allowing him to reflect on his own convictions, his own ideals, with the same hard constancy of the roots that, penetrating laboriously into the ancient walls that encircle Volterra to find nourishment there, renew every year the miraculous birth of leaves, flowers, fruits.”

Following the exhibitions held at Palazzo dei Priori between 2022 and 2024 entitled The Turning Years 2018-1980 and From Object to Space 1980-1968, the exhibition Mino Trafeli: Being Modern/Becoming Contemporary 1968-1947 traces the career of the Volterra sculptor back to his modern origins, when in 1947, after years of “Renaissance Florentineism” and forcing “strapaese” suggestions (in Florence frequenting the likes of Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti and Alessandro Parronchi) he began to be inspired by Cubism, Paris, and the sculpture of Boccioni and Mino Rosso, gradually broadening his horizon first toward neo-naturalism, then informal art, and, on the threshold of 1968, toward object art.

Palazzo dei Priori thus hosts the concluding exhibition dedicated to his sculpture with works ranging from the first chine and wooden works of a Cubofuturist matrix of male and female figures from 1947 to sculptures in welded and “sewn” iron dedicated to female figures, animals, roots, mothers, to the cycle Figure and Environment in bronze together with large temperas and paintings of the 1960s, a genre, the pictorial one, that in Trafeli would later convert over the decades into painted sculptures, graphic folders and spatial conceptions, as foreshadowed by the work of later date in the exhibition, a 1968 Root in yellow marble and resin.

As Marco Tonelli, curator of the exhibition together with Marta Trafeli, the artist’s daughter and head of the Trafeli Archive, summarizes in the catalog, what his sculptures “produced between 1947 and 1968 seem to anticipate will not be so much the concept and practice of the impossibility of the object, nor the ’object use or the ironic a Duchampian valence, nor the happy metaphysical mythological drift of the 1980s or even the drawing sculptures of the late work but, paradoxically, the neurotic, erotic and visceral charge of the use of one’s own body starting with the theatrical actions and the agile sculptures of the 1970s.”

It is from here that begins the disruptive, passionate, at times even brutal and poetic adventure at the same time and always committed (to the 1950s and 1960s date several of his public monuments) of a sculptor who protected his own freedom working in the solitude of Volterra’s studios but not isolated from the world (just think of his political commitment as a councilman and town councillor between the 1940s and 1950s or the organizational role he had in the historic public art review Volterra 73), not to mention that between the 1950s and 1960s he took part in several Quadriennali in Rome and that in 1964 he was invited to his first International Biennale in Venice.

A catalog will be published for the occasion by Sillabe with contributions by Marco Tonelli, Nico Stringa, and Lorenzo Fiorucci.

Biographical profile of the artist (1947-1968)

The son and grandson of alabastrai, Mino Trafeli was born on December 29, 1922, in Volterra, the city where he began to receive his first rudiments of craftsmanship. Few works are preserved from that early period, including an alabaster Pierrot. He obtained his diploma at the Regia Scuola Artistica Industriale in Volterra in 1937, enrolled at the Regio Istituto d’Arte in Florence, where he graduated in 1940 and was taught by the literary critic and art historian Alessandro Parronchi.

In 1944, after being called to arms, he refused to join the republican army and joined the Resistance, thanks to a friend who had put him in touch with the underground movement. From these years until its dissolution, he would militate in the Partito d’Azione, where he met art critic and historian Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, constituent father Piero Calamandrei, and jurist Paolo Barile. Dating back to the years between 1940 and 1943 were his friendships with writer Carlo Cassola (whose funeral monument he would perform in the cemetery of Montecarlo di Lucca) and gallery owner Piero Santi, a Volterra writer and founder of the L’Indiano Gallery in Florence. He thus began his political activity as town councilor in Volterra right in the Partito d’Azione.

In 1965 he married Maria Masti (their daughter Marta would be born from their marriage in 1967) and the following year he was elected town councillor for public works and education and president of the commission for the study of the economic, social problems of Volterra and its territory. Also in 1956 he began his collaboration with Giovanni Fumagalli’s Galleria delle Ore in Milan, where he would exhibit in several solo shows (1957, 1961, 1963 and 1966). In the meantime he will also take part in several Quadrennial Exhibitions in Rome (1955, 1959 and 1965), the International Sculpture Biennial in Carrara (1957), the Milan Triennial (1959), the São Paulo Biennial in Brazil (1963) and the Venice Biennial (1964), where he will be noticed by critics Gillo Dorfles and Enrico Crispolti, with whom in the following decades and until his death he will hold deep and uninterrupted human and professional relationships), holding a solo exhibition at the Galleria L’Indiano in Florence in 1963. It was between the 1950s and 1960s that he made all his most representative public monuments, including the one to the Fisherman in Livorno (1956), to the Fallen in the War in Lissone (1962), to the Resistance in Pisa (1966), to the July 1, 1944 Memorial in Volterra (1966) and to the Freedom Monument in Pomarance (1950-1997). In 1964 the first monograph on his work came out, edited by Franco Russoli, an art critic originally from Florence and director of the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan from 1957 to 1977.

An exhibition on modern and contemporary Mino Trafeli in Volterra

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