From Montparnasse to Versilia. Gigi Guadagnucci's marble virtuosity on display.

From September 18 to November 7, 2021, the works of marble virtuoso Gigi Guadagnucci (Massa, 1915 - 2013) are on display in Forte dei Marmi: the exhibition Guadagnucci. The Challenge of White to the Universe of Color is the project that the Society of Fine Arts of Viareggio, under the Patronage of the Municipality of Forte dei Marmi and in collaboration with Villa Bertelli, is proposing in the spaces of Forte Leopoldo I, symbol of the city.

Through a focused selection of about fifteen sculptures from the Apuan artist’s studio, the exhibition highlights his abstract Parisian production, beginning in the late 1950s. “Discovered” by Claude Rivière and admired by Marc Gaillard and Pierre Courthion, who calls Gigi Guadagnucci a “poet of form” appreciating “his dreams and moods, his doubts and convictions, his reason for living, his passion, his genius,” theGuadagnucci’s work, which today in part finds a home at the Guadagnucci Museum in Massa where many of his most important works are exhibited, was nourished by the artistic fervor breathed in Montparnasse, in contact with the interpreters of the most up-to-date trends of the day: Giacometti to Zadkine, Klein and Tinguely, Moore, Lipchitz to Marini.

The project, eight years after his death and thirteen since his last solo exhibition at the Forni Gallery in Bologna, invites a reconsideration of Guadagnucci’s work among the most original of his time for his creative flair in the transfiguration of reality, according to the lines and images of contemporaneity. In the concentration of forms stretched out into the air in search of a dimension that enhances their harmony, the exhibition restores the profile of a highly talented, refined and elegant artist who, forged in the “beautiful marble mountain,” where he was born and raised, boldly molds a material with which theman has always been confronted with, making it light and delicate, bordering on the impalpable, transforming it, as the artist put it, “in the most varied figures into epidermis of newly blossomed maidens, into transparencies of flower petals crossed by the sun’s rays and changed into many colors, into very white meteors even, into sensual and crazy blades of speed, of yesterday, of today, of always.”

This is the thought behind an extremely sophisticated work, which the exhibition intends to enhance by contrasting, in a kind of challenge, the absolute whiteness of those aerial forms with the vividness of an extraordinary gallery of still lifes - also exceptional loans, exhibited on the second floor, where it is the color that imposes itself instead. In fact, the aesthetic oxymoron generated by placing side by side with Guadagnucci’s works the silent depictions of Donghi, De Chirico, De Pisis, Ghiglia, Lloyd, Longoni and other protagonists of the twentieth century who transferred part of their interiority and visual perception to still life is not more than a little provocative, given the common quest for plasticity, elegance and absolute purity.

“It is with great pleasure that Forte dei Marmi, thanks to the will of the Department of Culture and Tourism and Villa Bertelli, renews its collaboration with the Society of Fine Arts,” says Mayor Bruno Murzi, “opening the doors of the Fortino to an exhibition of the highest level that intends to pay homage to one of the best-known Italian sculptors, Gigi Guadagnucci, master of ’light marble.’ An emotional journey among his works that promises to be a real experience, to be lived in suspension, leaving out space and time.”

Pictured: Gigi Guadagnucci, Meteor Passage. Photo by Enrico Amici

From Montparnasse to Versilia. Gigi Guadagnucci's marble virtuosity on display.

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