In Pesaro, the works of Giuliano Vangi on display at the Pescheria Visual Arts Center

Opening from December 14, 2024 until January 6, 2025, inside the loggia of the Fondazione Pescheria- Centro Arti Visive Pescheria in Pesaro, the exhibition Towards the Museum Giuliano Vangi. The Master of Form promoted by the City of Pesaro and Fondazione Pescheria - Centro Arti Visive in collaboration with Pesaro Musei and the organization of Civita Mostre e Musei. The exhibition dedicated to the painter Giuliano Vangi (Barberino di Mugello, 1931 - Pesaro, 2024) represents the second appointment of the exhibition cycle called Inheriting the Future: from the great masters to digital art, a review that is part of the very rich schedule of Pesaro Italian Capital of Culture 2024.

Toward the Giuliano Vangi Museum. The Master of Form presents to the city of Pesaro, to which the master was very close, a conspicuous selection of the Vangi bequest, consisting of about 130 works, including sculptures, drawings and resin paintings, received by bequest in his will to the City of Pesaro thanks to the generosity of the family, and which in the future will flow into a museum dedicated to the artist at Palazzo Mazzolari Mosca. The recent acquisition enriches Pesaro’s cultural heritage, consolidating the city’s commitment to enhancing and promoting its historical and artistic legacy for the collective good and social development. With a presentation entrusted to Vittorio Sgarbi, the initiative pays homage to one of the great masters of twentieth-century art and underscores the deep bond between the artist, a native of Barberino di Mugello, and Pesaro, the city he chose as his second home and where he passed away on March 26. Vangi arrived in Pesaro in 1951 as a young teacher at the Mengaroni Art Institute. After numerous experiences abroad, he returned to the Marche city, where he decided to settle permanently. Among the works the public will be able to admire are monumental sculptures in marble, painted plaster, aluminum, bronze, brass, corten steel, plexiglass and terracotta, dedicated to themes central to the artist’s poetics, such as the human condition and its contradictions. Two painted resins and a selection of works emblematic of his artistic research complete the exhibition. Giuliano Vangi’s creations, deeply focused on the human being, investigate spiritual dimensions and question the essence of humanity, with its sufferings, hopes, certainties and fragilities. In his vision, the world is a precarious balance between violence and harmony, and the skill with which he molds matter becomes the means to exalt the strength and fragility of the human condition.

Notes on the artist

Born in Barberino di Mugello in 1931, Giuliano Vangi immediately showed a remarkable aptitude for drawing. He studied at the Art Institute of Florence, a pupil of Bruno Innocenti, and later attended the Academy of Fine Arts and the Nude School. After completing his training, he moved first to Pesaro-where he taught at the Art Institute from 1950 to 1959-and then moved that same year to São Paulo, Brazil, where he remained until 1962. During his Brazilian sojourn he devoted himself to abstract research, working with crystal and metals such as iron and steel, achieving his first results within the art world: in fact, he won first prize at the Curitiba Salon, exhibited at the São Paulo Art Museum and in 1961 participated in the VI São Paulo Biennial and in a traveling group show in the United States. After the Brazilian interlude ended, he settled in Varese and taught for a few years at the Art Institute of Cantù. His return to Italy coincides with the recovery of figuration: it is then that he creates works with a strong evocative implantation and an extraordinary expressive force obtained also thanks to the use of the most diverse materials: wood, marble, ivory, various stones with surprising joints and metals. After his first solo show in Italy, at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence in 1967 organized by Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, a fruitful season of exhibitions in Italy and abroad began for Vangi, including one at the Palazzo della Permanente in Milan in 1977 and a large solo show at the headquarters of the Italian-Latin American Institute in Rome in 1978. His first exhibition in New York dates back to 1981, at the Sindin Gallery, while in 1988 he exhibited his work for the first time in the East, at Gallery Universe in Tokyo. Still in Japan, in 2002 the Vangi Museum was inaugurated in the city of Mishima, at the foot of Mount Fuji, a two-thousand-square-meter building inside a thirty-thousand-square-meter park, where about a hundred sculptures and drawings are exhibited. The following decade includes solo exhibitions: 2004 Il Grande Racconto at the Rotonda della Besana in Milan, 2007 Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Tokyo, 2009 Galleria Nove in Berlin. In 2014 dates the major exhibition Giuliano Vangi. Works 1994-2014 in the two pavilions of MACRO at Testaccio in Rome. In 2018 Pesaro promotes a double solo show at the Pescheria Visual Arts Center and simultaneously at Galleria Ca’ Pesaro 2.0. Of the same year is The Sculpture of Memory, in Apricena stone, placed in Piazza Mosca in the heart of Pesaro. In 2022 the major exhibition Colloquio con l’antico. Pisano, Donatello, Michelangelo at the Mart in Rovereto. There are many works commissioned from Vangi by public state and religious bodies in Italy and abroad and numerous awards received during his long artistic activity: in 1993 the Premio Presidente della Repubblica, in 1995 the Premio Donatello in Florence, in 1996 the Michelangelo in Rome, in 2002 the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo. He died in Pesaro on March 26, 2024. Among the works that are part of the Pesaro civic collections is a drawing by the artist donated by him in 2009 entitled Study for Sculpture, black pencil on paper (2008, 110x80 cm).

In Pesaro, the works of Giuliano Vangi on display at the Pescheria Visual Arts Center

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