Ferrara dedicates a major anthological exhibition to Adelchi Riccardo Mantovani and his dreamlike realism

From March 5 to October 9, 2022, the Castello Estense in Ferrara is dedicating an anthological exhibition to painter and draftsman Adelchi Riccardo Mantovani, The Dream of Ferrara. Born in Ro Ferrarese in 1942, orphaned by his father, he was entrusted to the nuns of the Ferrara orphanage from 1946 to 1952 and then sent to boarding school to attend vocational courses to learn the trade of turner. In 1964 he moved to Germany and, two years later, settled in Berlin, where he began working in the factory. Thanks to the city’s cultural climate, he rediscovered his passion for drawing, which had manifested in his boarding school days. In Berlin he attended evening painting schools, nude courses, studied art history and exhibited in group shows. In 1979 he left the blue-collar trade to become a painter for good. In this period, his research aimed at creating a fantastic, allegorical and fairy-tale world, rooted in ancient art, that is, in the painting of the 15th century Po Valley and Flemish naturalism, comes to full maturity, while at the same time gathering suggestions from the most fascinating figurative currents of the early 20th century, from de Chirico’s Metaphysics to the German New Objectivity, from Delvaux’s and Magritte’s Surrealism to Magic Realism.

Organized by the Ferrara Arte Foundation and the Art Museum Service of the Municipality of Ferrara in collaboration with the Mart, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto, where it will move after the Ferrara stop, the exhibition, from an idea of Vittorio Sgarbi, intends to retrace Mantovani’s entire production, from his beginnings to his most recent works, through more than one hundred works, including paintings and drawings, with the aim of documenting his personal interpretation of a dreamlike realism constantly influenced by the observation of reality and memory.

The public will have the opportunity to retrace in chronological order the main moments of the artist’s production: from the compositions of the youthful period to the autobiographical and fairy-tale works of the 1980s and 1990s; from the images of allegorical and popular taste to the visions of the Po Valley, to the latest works related to the present.

For info: www.castelloestense.it

Hours: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Closed Tuesdays.

Image: Adelchi Riccardo Mantovani, Heroic Landscape, detail (2008; oil on panel, 75 x 55 cm; Private collection) Photo by Luca Gavagna.

Ferrara dedicates a major anthological exhibition to Adelchi Riccardo Mantovani and his dreamlike realism

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