Forte dei Marmi celebrates the relentless exploration of Alfredo Catarsini in an exhibition

The exhibition Alfredo Catarsini - Explorations, curated by Catarsini Foundation President Elena Martinelli, in collaboration with Adolfo Lippi, Claudia Menichini and Andrea Pucci, has been presented at Villa Bertelli in Forte dei Marmi, although due to the pandemic it is not yet accessible to the public.The exhibition will continue until June 6, 2021. However, while waiting to visit it live, it can be visited online thanks to the virtual tour accessible at www.fondazionecatarsini.com. The aim of the Catarsini Foundation is to enhance the intellectual and artistic work of Alfredo Catarsini, a master from Versilia who died in 1993, and to promote and popularize artistic disciplines. The Alfredo Catarsini 1899 Foundation has just been established and has been granted “Legal Personality” status by the Ministry of the Interior.

"The newly formed Catarsini Foundation makes its debut in Versilia with the exhibition Explorations,“ commented Ermindo Tucci, president of the Villa Bertelli Foundation, ”which brings to the exhibition halls of Villa Bertelli in Forte dei Marmi sixty works by Alfredo Catarsini in a skillful artistic journey, able to highlight his incessant curiosity, a faithful companion throughout his life. A noble son of our land, who breathed the fertile and free cultural climate of the first half of the 20th century, keeping intact its frank peculiarities. We hope that the debut in Forte dei Marmi will be the first step in a new rediscovery of this distinguished artist of ours."

“This set up in the halls of Villa Bertelli, which I thank for its hospitality,” added Elena Martinelli, “is the first exhibition of the Foundation that I chair, which presents itself to the public with a review of works chosen to illustrate to the visitor who Alfredo Catarsini was and how his pictorial research evolved over time. In the panorama of twentieth-century Italian art, Catarsini was able to ’break’ with tradition to arrive at new and original forms of expression that will be ’explored’ in this temporary exhibition of some of his most significant works.”

The exhibition stems from the desire to celebrate two important moments in the artist’s long career: the forty years that Alfredo Catarsini has spent from 1927 to the present, the great anthological exhibition that was set up in the spaces of the Strozzina (Palazzo Strozzi) in Florence from June 23 to July 12, 1981, and that exhibited more than two hundred works by the artist from Viareggio, and the thirty years that have passed since the last major exhibition of Catarsini’s works, set up in 1991 in the spaces of Villa Paolina Bonaparte, in Viareggio.

At the same time, the exhibition aims to offer a key to the interpretation of Catarsini’s art through the careful selection of works united by his incessant need to study, to update, to live his present, that is, to explore.

Set up in three rooms on the second floor of Villa Bertelli, the exhibition displays a selection of 64 works from between 1934 and 1982, divided into four sections: landscapes (12 paintings), figures, portraits, self-portraits and drawings (26 works), Reflexism (12 works from the period 1940-1947) and Mechanical Symbolism (11 paintings from the period 1970-1990); the latter two are original styles of the artist. Also featured will be some unpublished documents from the Foundation’s Historical Archives.

One room will then host the screening of a video dedicated to Alfredo Catarsini’s artistic story through the works, images of his birthplace and atelier, now an integral part of the Civic Museums of Villa Paolina Bonaparte, in Viareggio, and of the Foundation recently established in his name, where many of his works are kept.

As the journalist and writer Adolfo Lippi states, “from naturalism and post-macchiaiola painting, with Catarsini there was a shift to intimist, character, sentimental painting, and then also to non-painting, of the new, mechanical, mathematical restlessness. Here, Catarsini was the protagonist of this transition from the figurative art of the 1930s to the abstract art of the 1950s.”

Thanks to 3D digital capture technology, the Alfredo Catarsini - Explorations exhibition can be visited virtually through any device to discover all the artist’s works in 4K resolution and access all the insights.

Image: Alfredo Catarsini, Mechanical Composition (1970; oil on canvas, 75 x 62 cm; private collection)

Forte dei Marmi celebrates the relentless exploration of Alfredo Catarsini in an exhibition

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