Milan, a major exhibition on Italian painting in the 1980s at Gallerie d'Italia

From June 2 to October 3, 2021, the Gallerie d’Italia in Milan ’s Piazza Scala presents a major exhibition on Italian painting in the 1980s, entitled Painting is back. Anni Ottanta, Painting in Italy, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero. Starting with a seemingly paradoxical title, namely Painting is back, since painting in Italy has in fact never waned, more than forty years after the 1980s the exhibition proposes a survey of the protagonists of that decade, who provocatively understood painting as a happy and rapacious ability to paint the world of images with a new vitality and who, from the very beginning, had an international visibility and an almost overflowing fame. The exhibition is dedicated to the audience of the new generation and proceeds by lunges, certainly not exhaustive but revealing, of the transversality experienced by the artists in those years.

The narrative takes its cue from a commentary on the historic Berlin exhibition Zeitgeist in the “New York Times” published in December 1982: the U.S. newspaper notes that “the Italians [...] turn up everywhere” (“Gli Italiani [...] sono dappertutto”), a comment that testifies to the international energy shared by Italian artists in those years, as well as to their disruptive force with respect to a system that was beginning to define itself as global. This is true not only for the most recurrent names in memory, linked to the fame of the Transavanguardia launched, almost in avant-garde manifesto fashion, by Achille Bonito Oliva from the pages of “Flash Art”(La Trans-avanguardia italiana, 1979), but also for artists who moved in continuity with the previous generation, such as Mario Schifano, present with large canvases, unpublished and singular, with colors almost as desperate as they are pyrotechnic, or Salvo with his landscapes made of ruins never so vital and palpitating, and again Franco Angeli, remembered with a Notturno romano (1985-1988) of almost two meters in homage to his city or the vitality of the echoes with an anthropological and multiethnic flavor by Aldo Mondino.

The exhibition begins with works between 1977 and 1980, surprising as they are germinal, by Gino De Dominicis, Luigi Ontani and Mimmo Paladino attesting to a creative freedom that has its roots in the Italian visual tradition and, without complexes, interprets it also through drawing, the photographic medium up to the re-proposition of a monumental video-installation of 1984, Il nuotatore (va troppo spesso ad Heidelberg), by Studio Azzurro. The 1980s is no longer understood as an orthodoxy of movements but as the reconstruction of an open dialogue between the protagonists of the time, where authors such as Mario Merz, master of the rediscovery of the great myths of humanity or Carol Rama with a visionary and sensitive painting linked to her own subjectivity, are to be found.

Fundamental works by Sandro Chia such as the 1978 Painter will be compared and, in the development of the exhibition in a sort of counterpoint, paintings by Mimmo Germanà together with Ernesto Tatafiore. Francesco Clemente presents historical works such as the Untitled of 1980 from the Intesa Sanpaolo Collection; while in the turn of these years Nicola De Maria tackles mural painting and major poetic themes that go side by side with the irreverent and playful compositions of Aldo Spoldi and the articulate path of Enzo Cucchi, who ideally opens the exhibition with Le stimmate (1980). Different personalities, in dialogue since those years side by side in the major international exhibitions; from the Venice Biennale to Documenta in Kassel or in exhibitions that have marked the history of art since the 1970s, such as Europa79 in Stuttgart (1979), A New Spirit in Painting at the Royal Academy in London (1981) and the already mentioned Zeitgeist in Berlin (1982). It should be remembered, at this juncture, how the 1980s witnessed the birth of a new “art system” that united the great galleries of New York, Cologne, and Zurich with the galleries of Italian cities such as Modena, Naples, Milan, or Turin in a particularly vital and active Italian fabric, even in its province. With counterbalances of a transversal nature, from that milieu linked to the great Milanese experimentations and “other” culture, the exhibition also gives an account of the return to Italy of protagonists of those years such as Mimmo Rotella or Valerio Adami or of that figure of great intellectual, translator, critic who was Emilio Tadini.

To Enrico Baj the exhibition dedicates an entire room built around four rare paintings from the Intesa Sanpaolo collection, made between the 1950s and 1960s, which accompany the visitor in a maturation of the artist’s pictorial language and creative mechanism, to then lead him to the spectacular Il mondo delle idee: a 19-meter-long, spray-painted canvas, almost a contemporary graffiti executed in 1983 and today of surprising relevance.

Giovanni Bazoli, Chairman Emeritus of Intesa Sanpaolo, says, "We are pleased to open to the public of the Gallerie d’Italia the Painting is back exhibition, a fascinating review that presents the painting of the 1980s in Italy, juxtaposing masterpieces owned by Intesa Sanpaolo with important works from other prestigious collections. On many occasions, our Bank has firmly reiterated its belief that cultural and artistic heritage can be a valuable lever to initiate the country’s rebirth. The new exhibition, in the difficult time we are still living through, is dedicated precisely to a season of Italian art that sends a signal of confidence in the future. Intesa Sanpaolo, aware of the importance of the civic mission entrusted to museum institutions, has intensified its commitment to strengthening the role of the Gallerie d’Italia as places designed to foster the social and cultural growth of our communities."

At the same time as the exhibition, a special issue of the magazine “Flash Art” will be published and distributed, which in a new guise will bring together articles, interviews, and documents related to the artists in the exhibition and will restore the critical richness of those 1980s of which as a magazine it was one of the fundamental instruments of international Italian artistic culture. The volume accompanying the exhibition intends to collect the cultural temperament of those years: a reading tool aimed once again at the new generations, a visual journey even before the critical one where, images of the exhibited works, some talking iconographic comparisons and historical documents precede curator Luca Massimo Barbero’s essay, with interventions by Cristina Beltrami, Michele Bonuomo, Maria Luisa Frisa, Chiara Mari, Luca Scarlini and Studio Azzurro for a glimpse of the vitality, not only of the visual arts, but also of new media, the world of fashion, creativity and theater (Gallerie d’Italia | Skira editions).

In the photo: a room of the exhibition

Milan, a major exhibition on Italian painting in the 1980s at Gallerie d'Italia

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