Milan, an anthological exhibition on Sandro Somarè at the Milan Gallery Foundation.

From September 25 through mid-November 2024, the Milan Gallery Foundation in Milan presents the retrospective anthological exhibition entitled Sandro Somarè. The exhibition is dedicated to the artist Sandro Somarè (Milan, 1929 - Lucca, 2012), curated by Nicola Pellegrini, Ornella Mignone, and Bianca Trevisan, and is held on the occasion of the presentation of the general catalog and the opening of theSandro Somarè Archive. The catalog, curated by Ornella Mignone and Bianca Trevisan with Rosella Ghezzi and Toni Merola, is the result of a work begun in 2017 desired by Patrizia Ascari Somarè and Carla Pellegrini Rocca and made possible thanks to the artist’s heirs Patrizia Ascari Somarè, Elena Somarè and Maria Somarè.

The exhibition presents the work of Sandro Somarè from his beginnings in the 1950s until his death that occurred in 2012. The artist was one of the key figures of Galleria Milano: his father Enrico Somarè founded the first Galleria Milano in 1928, which was later closed due to the war in 1938. Sandro and his brother Guido Somarè reopened it in 1964 along with painters Aldo Bergolli, Gianni Dova, and Mario Rossello, to name Carla Pellegrini Rocca as director the following year. At Galleria Milano Somarè he would have five solo exhibitions, as well as participate in some group shows. The dialogue with Carla Pellegrini, a lifelong friend, will remain close and fruitful, until the artist’s death in 2012. The exhibition aims to give an account of all phases of Sandro Somarè’s artistic poetics: from the initial interest in landscape painting, to formal decomposition, through the study of light and also buildings that are investigated in both interiors and exteriors. In the final phase of his career, he will devote himself to the representation of the city and the suburbs, as well as the abstract pictorial series Hölderlin, in memory of the famous German poet.

Somarè’s interest in landscape can be traced back to the beginning of his career: in fact, since 1965 he has been reinterpreting this theme in an abstract and geometric key, but also soft and fluid at the same time, as in the work in the exhibition Qualcosa in più from 1959. Since the mid-1980s, with 1988’s A Place and a Myth and 1992’s Entrance, the artist has been usingarchitecture as a symbol of existentialsolitude and dreaminess, part of his poetics since the mid-1960s. The attraction to light leads Somarè to synthesize his language, as seen in the works Death in the Cube / Self-Portrait in a Particular Time and Space of 1965, or Outside You Die of 1966 and Waiting of 1966, but also Walls, Desert, Image, Shadow of a Return a triptych of 1967, where the color fields are homogeneous with a palette reduced to the colors of gray, sand, blue. Organisms become human figures in the solitude of a desolate landscape. With the works Porta Nuova of 1969 and Piazza Conciliazione of 1970, Somarè pays homage to the city of Milan, a fundamental part of his life and formation. Two other works from the same period are also almost metaphysical: 1972’s Impossible de changer d’endroit and 1973’s Untitled.

The placement of the Archivio Sandro Somarè at the spaces of the newly founded Fondazione Galleria Milano represents the first part of the Foundation’s project to enhance contemporary art archives Archivi Riuniti.

Milan, an anthological exhibition on Sandro Somarè at the Milan Gallery Foundation.

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