Kandinsky and avant-garde masterpieces on display in Mestre, from Klee to Basaldella

From September 30, 2022 to February 21, 2023, the Candiani Cultural Center in Mestre will host the exhibition Kandinsky and the Avant-Garde. Point, Line and Surface, curated by Elisabetta Barisoni and organized by the Venetian Civic Museums Foundation. A MUVE project that presents a rich exhibition with works from its collections.

Along with Kandinsky’s masterpieces, masterpieces by Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Enrico Prampolini, Jean Hans Arp, Victor Brauner, Joan Mirò, Antoni Tàpies, Yves Tanguy, Luigi Veronesi, Ben Nicholson, Karel Appel, Roberto Matta, Giuseppe Santomaso, Mario Deluigi, Tancredi, Mark Tobey, Emilio Vedova, Mirko Basaldella, Eduardo Chillida, Bruno De Toffoli, Julia Mangold, Luciano Minguzzi, and Richard Nonas.

Kandinsky and the Avant-Gardes is an exhibition that leads the way on two counts. On the one hand, it indicates the choice by the MUVE Foundation to kick off a new phase of the Candiani Center; on the other, it is a factual testimony to the new network of collaborations that Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia has created with the enlarged territorial sphere. In a smaller format, the exhibition was in fact offered at the Municipal Gallery of Contemporary Art in Monfalcone. “That of collaborations with other museum realities of contiguous territories is a road that with Fondazione we have traveled with several municipalities and institutions,” commented Mariacristina Gribaudi, president of the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia. “An effective action for the quality response of which these territories are capable, in the common goal of the growth of our communities.”

“This exhibition is built with masterpieces from the collections of the International Gallery of Modern Art at Ca’ Pesaro, one of our eleven extraordinary museums,” said Gabriella Belli, director of the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, “to tell the fascinating journey of abstract art from its birth to our contemporary. Many of these works have been purchased by the City of Venice in different editions of the Biennale, others have been donated to the Gallery by the award-winning artists themselves, bearing witness to a long history of esteem and gratitude that binds the Museums to the city and its cultural institutions, collectors, patrons and artists. Ca’ Pesaro is the custodian of the art of its time and here the natural protagonist of an important cultural action.”

“After the first part dedicated to the birth of abstraction,” explained the curator, “the exhibition presents, again through the masterpieces of Ca’ Pesaro, the avant-garde between abstraction and Surrealism. Along the line traced by Klee and Kandinsky, during the 1920s are the experiments of Surrealism by Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy, Victor Brauner and Antoni Tàpies, the abstract sculpture of Jean Arp, the cosmic analogies of Enrico Prampolini and the musical forms of Luigi Veronesi. The third part of the exhibition explores the persistence of Abstraction after World War II. In the 1940s, Kandinsky’s lesson is declined in the English world with Ben Nicholson’s experience, in the international experiences of Abstract Expressionism, and in Italy of the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti and Signic Abstractionism. From Emilio Vedova to Mario Deluigi, from Giuseppe Santomaso to Tancredi, from Roberto Matta to Karel Appel to Mark Tobey, the forms of abstraction in the second part of the twentieth century lie somewhere between informal, lyrical suggestion and gestural. The exhibition closes with a valuable selection of sculpture, Sculpture Towards Minimalism, which completes the itinerary with masterpieces by Mirko Basaldella, Eduardo Chillida, Luciano Minguzzi and Bruno De Toffoli, testifying to the persistence of the dialogue between abstraction and biomorphism towards the 1950s. Finally, the resumption of a radical, almost ascetic abstraction makes its way with the minimal experiences of Richard Nonas and Julia Mangold, who introduce the visitor to the thinking of the 1970s, to the resurgence of a new life of art and abstract forms.”

Image: Vasily Kandinsky, Kleine Welten I (Small Worlds) (1922; color lithograph, 35.7 x 28 cm; Venice, Ca’ Pesaro - Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna, Paul Prast donation, 2020)

Kandinsky and avant-garde masterpieces on display in Mestre, from Klee to Basaldella

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