Museo Novecento, presents two new solo exhibitions on Mafai and Banchelli

The Museo Novecento in Florence has unveiled its two new temporary exhibitions that will be on view from July 11 to October 12, 2020. Two solo shows dedicated to Mario Mafai and Francesca Banchelli.

As part of the SOLO exhibition cycle dedicated to the great artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, Mario Mafai. Works from the Alberto Della Ragione Collection was born from the collaboration between the Museo Novecento and the SAGAS Department of the University of Florence: two students from the master’s program in Contemporary Art History, Stefania Delia Previti and Rebecca Ricci, curated together with museum director Sergio Risaliti the monographic exhibition dedicated to the artist. The exhibition is part of the project From the Classroom to the Museum designed to bring the field of academic research closer to that of museum education and outreach to the general public. “A project that concretely affirms the formative and educative function of the museum, the only one in the city to boast a major art collection on the twentieth century and a wide-ranging activity on artists from the early avant-garde to the present, with special attention also to the new generations. Enhancement, education, research, and updating are our watchwords, along with cultural mediation,” said the director.

On display will be works from the museum’s permanent collection that illustrate the central decades of the Roman painter’s career at the turn of World War II: these highlight his ties to Rome, his hometown, the recurrence of certain themes such as still lifes and landscapes, his association with other artists, such as Scipione and Guttuso, and his political and social commitment in defense of mankind under Nazi-Fascist dictatorship.

Present are theSelf-portrait from the 1920s, a painting from the Demolitions series, images of the urbanistic mutations suffered by Rome under the Mussolini regime, two versions of the Fiori secchi series, a theme dear to Mafai to which he owes the nickname “Mario dei fiori,” and a group of Roman views.

Francesca Banchelli, on the other hand, is the protagonist of the eighth appointment of the Duel project, which promotes a dialogue between contemporary artistsu and the museum’s artistic heritage. “This is a research and experimentation project,” commented Sergio Risaliti, "designed with the dual purpose of enhancing the permanent collection and updating the public on the quality of emerging artists. Duel is a system for activating new interpretations of twentieth-century art put forth by artists, unprecedented readings that arise from the artist’s own eye, from his or her ability to enter into dialogue with the work of a “colleague,” identified on the basis of interests and reasoning that can also be poetic, thematic and formal."

Francesca Banchelli. I cani silenziosi se ne ne ne ne vanno via is the Tuscan artist’s first solo exhibition in an Italian museum and was made possible thanks to a grant from the Exhibit Program | Direzione Generale Creatività Contemporanea of MiBACT. Curated by Sergio Risaliti and Eva Francioli, the exhibition is developed around a dialogue with Scipio’s work Apocalypse, created in 1930 and chosen by Francesca Banchelli because the latter’s idea of art is close to Scipio’s. She is convinced of the necessity of the work as an epiphany and a gnoseological event inescapable to the evolution of the human species. Moreover, there are linguistic elements that link Banchelli’s path to Scipio, and by extension to that artistic climate; a certain way of understanding figurative language as a means of approaching reality through the oneiric, surreal experience of the imaginary and the dream.

The Tuscan artist works with different materials and techniques, from performances between dance and theater to video, drawing, painting, sculpture and sound. All the works in the exhibition thus present the multifaceted nature of her creative activity and are linked to the theme Banchelli has been pursuing for years, the fugitive. The Fugitives are solitary figures or small communities that set out and meet, physically or ideally, to reformulate a new beginning, starting from something that has been interrupted or destroyed. Apocalypse and the Fugitives speak to each other in the sign of epochal change.

The two exhibitions dedicated to Mafai and Banchelli are linked by the figure of Scipione, friend of the former and reference point of the latter. Banchelli’s large paintings are characterized by a pictorial language steeped in romanticism, but at the same time surreal and dreamlike like Scipione’s, where the figures seem to have the function of witnesses and guardians of omens and prophetic visions.

For info: www.museonovecento.it

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Image: Mario Mafai, Self-Portrait (1928; oil on canvas, Civic Collection gift Alberto Della Ragione)

Museo Novecento, presents two new solo exhibitions on Mafai and Banchelli

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