More than one hundred works from Pietro Cascella's early days on display at the Casino di Villa Torlonia, many previously unpublished

For the first time in Rome, at the Casino dei Principi of Villa Torlonia, the exhibition Pietro Cascella Unpublished. Early Works in Rome (1938-1961), curated by the National Committee for the Celebration of the Centenary of his Birth (1921-2021) established by the Ministry of Culture.

The exhibition presents a never-before-seen Pietro Cascella (Pescara 1921- Pietrasanta 2008) through more than one hundred works, many of them unpublished or little known, dating from the artist’s first two decades of activity, from the late 1930s to the early 1960s.

Promoted by Roma Culture, Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali, in collaboration with the culture department of the municipality of Pescara, and organized by Zètema Progetto Cultura, the exhibition aims to present the art of the great 20th-century Italian sculptor. Before arriving at what he called “true sculpture,” that is, sculpture in stone, the artist traveled the road from drawing to painting, with immediate public recognition, including participation in the IV Quadriennale in Rome in 1943, and the Venice Biennale in 1948.

About a decade, the first of the young Abruzzese’s activity, in which he presented himself essentially as a painter. A painting not of a constant sign, identifying a character in the making, but one that was able to grasp well the moods of the moment and accommodate the rapid linguistic evolutions that were taking place during the course of the 1940s. A path that can be seen in the exhibition through the early drawings of rural subjects that emphasize the artist’s bond with his land, up to the canvases in which he experimented with different languages, from the expressionist one of the Crucifixion of 1942 to the more properly post-cubist one visible in Woman of Abruzzo of 1948. This is one of the first little-known chapters of the Abruzzese artist, which the Pietro Cascella Inedito exhibition aims to recount.

A chapter that will be followed, from 1949, by the season of working with ceramics and the first approach to sculpture modeled, together with his brother Andrea, his wife Anna Maria Cesarini Sforza and Fabio Rieti, in the furnace of Valle dell’Inferno in Rome. It was there that the four young men rethought ceramics in a combination of formal innovation and renewal of popular tradition, such as the Mazzamurello (1953), a symbolic work of this period. An experience that is completed with projects for mosaics and, at the end of the decade, the landing to the working of metals, iron, aluminum and bronze, and finally cement, the latter also planned for the first competition won for the Auschwitz Monument together with his brother and the architect Julio Garcia Lafuente.

An experimental charge around techniques and materials marks all of the 1950s and the beginning of the following decade, in which Cascella approaches the production of a series of works defined as “sands” made in an innovative technique in which he breathes the climate of thematerial Informal of those years, troweling on large canvases sometimes assembled together, brick or marble powders in which anthropomorphic motifs emerge, synthesizing the anatomical structures of a body.

For info: www.museivillatorlonia.it

Hours: Tuesday through Sunday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.; last entry at 6 p.m. Closed Mondays and Jan. 1.

Photo by Luca Perazzolo.

More than one hundred works from Pietro Cascella's early days on display at the Casino di Villa Torlonia, many previously unpublished

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