At the Gallerie d'Italia in Milan, an exhibition on artists' palettes, from Van Gogh to Kandinsky

From July 1 to August 28, 2022, the Gallerie d’Italia in Milan ’s Piazza Scala hosts the exhibition Matthias Schaller. Das Meisterstück dedicated to the artist’s palette. Can we know and recognize a painter through his palette? German photographer-artist Matthias Schaller (Dillingen an der Donau, 1965) started from this very question to conceive this exhibition, which grew out of a visit he made in 2007 to Cy Twombly ’s studio in Gaeta. Noting the similarity between the palette used by Twombly and his canvases, the photographer defined a real research project that led him, over the course of many years and many trips, to visit dozens of museums, foundations, and private collections, immortalizing the palettes that great protagonists of nineteenth- and twentieth-century painting used to create their works.

Under the lens, this utilitarian object proved to be from a simple working tool a bridge between the artist’s personality and his painting. In each palette, the preparation of the hues, the matter of the color spread, mixed, dried, the paint scraped, the trace of the palette knife or brush, the stains express the intimate connection with the hand, the body, the mind of the artist. Painting before painting, they tell the story of his way of working, his color preferences, the gesture with which the color is transferred to the canvas. Transferred from the sphere of painting to that of photography, the palette dematerializes to the point of losing all physical and material connotations; it thus takes on a new meaning.

A selection of nineteen large-format photographs from the project, which has been ongoing for fifteen years and to date consists of more than two hundred palettes by eighty-six painters, is then presented in the Hall of Columns. The series is entitled Das Meisterstück. Here a photograph of Giorgio De Chirico ’s palette is placed in dialogue with the same artist’s painting, Mannequins on the Seashore (1926), belonging to the Intesa Sanpaolo collections.

For info: https://www.gallerieditalia.com/

Hours: Tuesday through Sunday from 9:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.; Thursday until 10:30 p.m.

Tickets: Full 10 €, reduced 8 €, special reduced 5 € for Intesa Sanpaolo Group customers and under 26. Free for convention members, schools, under 18s, Intesa Sanpaolo Group employees.

Pictured, palettes by Edgar Degas and Wassily Kandinsky photographed by Matthias Schaller © Matthias Schaller / VG Bildkunst, Bonn / Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery, New York City

At the Gallerie d'Italia in Milan, an exhibition on artists' palettes, from Van Gogh to Kandinsky

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