Fortunato Depero's masterpieces on display for the first time in Mantua

Coinciding with Festivaletteratura, the exhibition Depero acrobatico automatico, curated by Nicoletta Boschiero, head of the Casa d’Arte Futurista Depero, will open to the public on Sept. 7, 2022, and remain open until Feb. 26, 2023.

The exhibition dedicated to Fortunato Depero, the intelligent creator of the Futurist aesthetic theorized in Ricostruzione futurista dell’Universo, signed with Giacomo Balla in 1915, will be staged at the Palazzo della Ragione in Mantua and will bring to the Lombard city for the first time about eighty of the artist’s most significant works between 1917 and 1938.

The exhibition was conceived by Electa in collaboration with Mart, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto, exclusively for the spaces of Palazzo della Ragione.

In his long artistic experience Depero built a total art form that ranged from painting to theater, from set design to applied arts, from publishing to advertising, becoming one of the protagonists of the Futurist movement. The exhibition is a journey through these multiple creative fields, punctuated in the three geographical stages of his artistic journey: Capri, Paris, New York.

In Capri, one of the most creative seasons that will have its climax between 1916 and 1918 kicks off, namely the one linked to the theatrical adventure he lived with the Swiss Gilbert Clavel, his companion, retraced through some drawings that belonged to Clavel himself. Also exhibited is an important masterpiece, such as Dancer’s Mechanics, from 1917, and some beautiful chine dedicated to the gothic novella Institute for Suicides, a prelude to the birth of the automaton with the play Balli plastici. In Rovereto in 1919, after the war was over, Depero gave life to a great dream of his, that of opening an art house specializing in advertising graphics, furniture and applied arts and, in particular, in that of the cloth inlays that would have great success in Paris at the 1925 Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes, “open to all industrialists whose products are artistic in character and clearly show a modern tendency.”

Finally, after successes at major national and international exhibitions, Depero and his wife Rosetta moved to New York in 1928, opening Depero’s Futurist House, a kind of American branch of the Rovereto art house. Depero’s advertising efforts took the form of concollaborations with prominent brands, and he prepared numerous cover designs for American Printer, Vogue, and Vanity Fair, as well as creating the theatrical sets for New Babel. A final section of the exhibition is then dedicated to his many years of collaboration with the Campari brand.

For info: www.deperomantova.it

Image: Fortunato Depero, Mechanics of Dancers (1917; oil on canvas, 75 x 71.3 cm; Mart, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto Autonomous Province of Trento - Superintendence for Cultural Heritage) © Fortunato Depero, by SIAE 2022

Fortunato Depero's masterpieces on display for the first time in Mantua

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