MAN in Nuoro celebrates Giovanni Pintori, master of Italian and international graphic design

MAN in Nuoro, in collaboration with the m.a.x. museum in Chiasso, presents from March 21 to June 15, 2025 a major retrospective dedicated to Giovanni Pintori (Tresnuraghes, 1912 - Milan, 1999), one of the greatest masters of Italian and international graphic design. The exhibition, entitled Giovanni Pintori (1912-1999) advertising as art, curated by Chiara Gatti and Nicoletta Ossanna Cavadini with coordination by Rita Moro, traces a path of fifty years of activity, during which Pintori transformed advertising into an artistic language that changed the face of visual communication.

The exhibition thus explores his long career with more than three hundred works, including drawings, paintings, original sketches, maquettes, magazine advertising pages, photographs and posters, presenting a journey through the projects and awards he received from the world’s most prestigious cultural institutions. In particular, Pintori, an absolute genius of advertising graphics, linked his name to the birth of the image of Olivetti, a company that chose his talent to convey the name of its company and products worldwide. Pintori began working with Olivetti’s Technical Advertising Office in 1936, became Art Director in 1940, and was instrumental in the creation of the brand’s famous image, including graphics for the Lettera 22 and Studio 44. It was a collaboration that profoundly marked his career and placed him among the protagonists of the international design scene.

Pintori always managed to synthesize, in every single image, form and content. Light, color, composition and creative play constitute his main areas of research. The fast rhythm of fingers on the keys of a typewriter, characters at large, the inner workings of calculators transformed into dynamic and cheerful patterns are some of the figures of his language. “Graphics is not sub-painting,” Pintori replied to those who questioned him about the language of the sign, the only one capable, as his friend and poet Vittorio Sereni pointed out, of “liberating the latent resources contained in the object or product that [...] is proposed.”

The exhibition, which traces the artist’s creative and professional iter, showing the ideational process from which the projects that have characterized his career, ranging from the creation of posters, to playbills, corporate identity, logotypes for companies, were born, is part of a broader process of valorization that the MAN Museum of Nuoro dedicates to the authors born in the Sardinian territory and who have become protagonists of the world art scene.

His career was studded with awards and recognition: from the Palme d’Or of the Italian Advertising Federation in 1950, to the Gold Medal of the Milan International Fair in 1956, to the Eight Annual Typographic Excellence Award of the Type Directors Club of New York in 1962. During the first meeting of the newly formed AGI - Alliance graphique Internationale - Pintori was made a member and later became president for Italy of the same award, while the famous Japanese magazine “Idea” included him in the roll of the thirty most significant designers of the 20th century.

The exhibition project is accompanied by a catalog published by Silvana Editoriale, with critical texts by Chiara Gatti, Nicoletta Ossanna Cavadini, Mario Piazza, Davide Cadeddu, Luigi Sansone and Angela Madesani, which offer an in-depth reading of Pintori’s work and his influence on advertising graphics and design.

Pictured is Giovanni Pintori. Paolo Pintori Archive

MAN in Nuoro celebrates Giovanni Pintori, master of Italian and international graphic design

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