At the Novecento Museum in Florence a monographic exhibition on Mirko Basaldella with sculptures, paintings and drawings

From October 25, 2019 to January 16, 2020, the Museo Novecento in Florence is hosting the exhibition Solo - Mirko Basaldella, entirely dedicated to the production of Mirko Basaldella (Udine, 1910 - Cambridge, 1969), on the 50th anniversary of his death. The exhibition, curated by Luca Pietro Nicoletti and Lorenzo Fiorucci, is part of the Solo cycle that the Florentine museum dedicates to important masters of the 20th century: the public will be able to admire a rich selection from the Mirko Basaldella Collection, which was acquired in the 1970s with a view to the establishment of a foundation dedicated to him and the painter Corrado Cagli, and which was to be located in the rooms of Palazzo Strozzi.

The works exhibited at the Museo Novecento cover the entire span of Mirko Basaldella’s career, illustrating his experiments (particularly the research born on the thread of his frequentation with Corrado Cagli, an artist well represented in the permanent collection of the Museo Novecento, from whom Basaldella took up the idea of eclectic art: Basaldella, moreover, also became a relative of Cagli’s by marrying his sister Serena). The Friulian artist was able to explore different strands of research, different in terms of language (Basaldella employed assemblages, cut-out metal leaves, paintings, drawings), but similar in terms of content, constantly reinventing the ways of New Dada and following the paths opened by Surrealism. Basaldella’s world is made up of eccentric totems, figures from ancient pasts and fantastic animals, united by the artist’s interest in primary and non-European arts. In this way, Basaldella translated into images an anthropological interest, typical of the era in which he was most active (between the 1940s and the 1960s), modes and rituals of distant and archaic cultures contributing to a renewed fortune of primitivism between informal and new figuration.

In addition to sculptures, the exhibition includes paintings and drawings. As for the latter medium, critic Giulio Carlo Argan wrote that “Mirko’s drawing is not surpassing but a mode of experience, a metaphysical moment of technique, that is, a mental or dialectical technique, and as such encompasses all the acts and facts of sculpture, and must bear not on the object, which is already idea in a certain sense drawing, but on the material, this explains its transit through a difficult controlled surrealist experience, which, moreover, marks only the moment not at all complacent, of the obscure confluence of the unconscious ego, and of matter in its nascent state, or if you will, the human condition that drawing and sculpture redeem.”

Mirko Basaldella was among the protagonists of the postwar renewal of Italian sculpture. The second of three brothers, also renowned artists (the sculptor Dino and the painter Afro), he studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, then finished his training in Florence with Domenico Trentacoste. In 1932 he studied at the ISIA in Monza with Arturo Martini, thanks to whom he developed an interest in Etruscan fictile sculpture and a taste for the archaic. In 1934 he moved to Rome, where he met Corrado Cagli, who included him in the circle of Galleria La Cometa, where he staged his first solo exhibition in 1936. The environment of the Roman School helped orient his research toward classical mythology, rediscovering working methods dating back to ancient Greek sculpture. In 1938 he exhibited in New York at Comet Gallery, the U.S. branch of Comet. After the war he won the competition to create the gate for the Fosse Ardeatine Mausoleum in Rome, made with large spatially interwoven constructions in an imaginative freedom that became the hallmark of his research. A series of trips to the Middle East and a move to the United States in 1957 contributed to the creation of works inspired by Eastern culture. Along this vein, throughout the course of the 1960s, totemic and structural inventions joined the magical and anthropological suggestion of distant cultures. In those same years, Basaldella combined artistic activity with teaching, directing the Design Workshop at Harvard University.

The exhibition can be visited during the opening hours of the Museo Novecento in Florence: Mondays from 2:30 to 7:30 p.m., Tuesdays through Sundays from 9:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. (Thursdays and Saturdays until 10:30 p.m.). Tickets: full 5 euros, reduced 3 euros. For all info, see the Museo del Novecento website.

At the Novecento Museum in Florence a monographic exhibition on Mirko Basaldella with sculptures, paintings and drawings

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