Giulio Turcato: Freedom and Happiness, in Rome the return of the visionary artist

Thirty years after the death of Giulio Turcato (Mantua, 1912 - Rome, 1995), Galleria Lombardi in Rome is dedicating an exhibition to one of the most significant and elusive artists on the Italian twentieth-century scene. The title of the exhibition, Freedom and Happiness, encapsulates the very essence of his artistic production, a constantly evolving reflection on the emancipation of form and the intensity of visual experience. The opening, set for Saturday, March 1, 2025, at 6 p.m., will mark the beginning of an exhibition that will continue through March 29. It is an opportunity to rediscover the path of one of the most authentic and daring artists of postwar Italy, a true protagonist of the avant-garde. The exhibition will be a journey through the most relevant moments of Turcato’s career, thanks to the selection of 25 works covering the main pictorial cycles he developed.

Born in Mantua in 1912, Turcato stood out from his youthful years for a personality of great charisma and incessant artistic research. His name is linked to the rediscovery of abstraction and his deep connection with the Gruppo Forma movement, which, together with the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti, represented one of the vital thrusts of the Italian art scene after World War II. However, his art never allowed itself to be defined by easy labels. Turcato was a tireless explorer of languages, capable of fusing geometric abstraction with suggestions of nature and the unconscious. In Freedom and Happiness, curators Lorenzo and Enrico Lombardi offer the public a comprehensive overview of Turcato’s art. The works in the exhibition include some of his most emblematic works, such as the very rare Comizi of 1948, a series of paintings that mix abstraction and civic engagement, through the Reticoli, where the painter plays with webs of lines on a monochrome background, testifying to his search for a visual language that explores the interaction between matter and light. Another highlight of the exhibition is the Itinerari (Itineraries), works in which threads of color and light intertwine and seem to trace impossible and infinite paths, similar to the threads of a luminous destiny. Completing the picture of his visual explorations are the Lunar Surfaces, a series that represents the encounter between painting and sculptural gesture, with the use of foam rubber and the invention of craters on the pictorial surface. Later works, such as the Archipelagos and collages with paper money, reveal his pioneering spirit, always seeking new forms of expression, always curious to expand the boundaries of visual perception. In a critical text included in the exhibition catalog, Guglielmo Gigliotti emphasizes Turcato’s distinctiveness as an artist and as a man.

“An undoubtedly original man. A free man,” Gigliotti writes. “He could not stand labels, he did not disdain demystification, he could not stand those who gave themselves too much importance. Self-irony was his human virtue, irony was his artistic one. His painting secretly vibrates with irony, which is that detachment with which one faces the vicissitudes of life. Free to play he felt Turcato all his life, even though it was the serious game of art and life. His presence was so brilliant, his painting so fresh, his wit so fertile, and his character so happy, that of these thirty years it seems almost impossible to feel the range. His painting is his living legacy. Just take a good look at the paintings in the exhibition: they throb and smile, between limpid flashes and mysterious shadows, between vibrant backgrounds and random arabesques of dazzling lines, between unconscious-deep ’moon surfaces’ and almost childlike geometries.”

The exhibition, which will be accompanied by a catalog published by Galleria Lombardi, is a reflection on his legacy, which remains vivid in his works. Prominent among the contributions in the catalog is a testimony by Giancarlo Limoni, Turcato’s artist and great friend, who died in early 2025. Written a month before his death, his testimony represents an act of love and recognition towards a master, and is considered by the curators as his poetic testament, an inseparable link between two kindred spirits.

Giulio Turcato: Freedom and Happiness, in Rome the return of the visionary artist

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