Palazzo dei Diamanti dedicates an extensive anthological exhibition to Achille Funi

Ferrara ’s Palazzo dei Diamanti will host from October 28, 2023 to February 25, 2024 the exhibition Achille Funi. A Master of the Twentieth Century between History and Myth, curated by Nicoletta Colombo, Serena Redaelli and Chiara Vorrasi and organized by the Ferrara Arte Foundation and the Art Museum Service of the Municipality of Ferrara. Awide-ranging anthological exhibition dedicated to one of the great artists of the 20th century, Virgilio Socrates Achille Funi (Ferrara, 1890 - Appiano Gentile, 1972), who traversed as a protagonist the main movements that characterized Italian culture in the first half of the 20th century. After distinguishing himself in the moderate wing of Futurism, Funi rose to prominence among the great interpreters of Magical Realism, the modern classicism of the Novecento and the muralism of the 1930s, while maintaining a marked autonomy. In love with classical myths and Renaissance wisdom, the artist drew on the formal values of the ancient figurative tradition as well as the more contemporary language of Cézanne, Picasso, Derain, and de Chirico.

His hometown thus pays tribute to him by offering the public an opportunity to reread the painter’s entire creative parabola through more than one hundred and twenty works, from important public and private, Italian and foreign collections, including the artist’s greatest masterpieces. Oil and tempera paintings, watercolors and charcoal and sanguine drawings, up to preparatory cartoons for the great frescoes and mosaics.

The exhibition will start with the young Funi’s first academic tests, which soon give way to avant-garde research and a Futurist phase of moderate sign, born out of his frequentation of Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo and Bonzagni, evidenced by emblematic works from 1914 such as Uomo che scende dal streetcar, from the Museo del Novecento in Milan, and Il motociclista. The public will then be taken through the stages of the Return to Order that develops in postwar Europe and of which Funi is an interpreter: from the transitional works, in the sign of Cézanne and metaphysics(Genealogy, 1918-19, at the Mart in Rovereto), to the masterpieces of Magic Realism that draw on the figurative culture of the 15th and 16th centuries in Ferrara and the Po Valley (in addition to Maternity and La terra, also L’acqua, exhibited again on this occasion after more than a century), to the milestones of “Novecento,” the movement led by Margherita Sarfatti, which gathered the best exponents of a modern classicism (from theAutoritratto at the Museo della Svizzera italiana in Lugano, to Picasso’s Saffo, from Raphaelesque Lettura at the GNAM in Rome, to the androgynous Venus at the Museo Cantonale in Lausanne).

The exhibition will continue with works from the 1930s and 1940s in which Funi tackles the genres of art history with a personal style, from portraits to historical-mythological painting, evidenced by Publius Horatius Kills His Sister at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, from still life, to landscape(The Roman Forum at the GAMC in Ferrara).

The exhibition will conclude with the season of mural painting. With Sironi, Funi gave new impetus to the Italian tradition of fresco and mosaic painting, actively engaged in the decoration of new public buildings constructed as part of the extensive building and urban planning activity promoted by the regime. The exhibition is also an opportunity to rediscover the Myth of Ferrara, an impressive decorative undertaking that Funi created for the Sala dell’Arengo of the Municipal Residence in the Este city. The cycle represents the summa of the large and numerous mural projects he frescoed in the 1930s and 1940s in Milan, Trieste, Rome and Tripoli, of which a significant selection of preparatory cartoons can be admired in the exhibition.

For info: www.palazzodiamanti.it

Image: Achille Funi, Maternity, detail (1921; oil on canvas, 100.5 x 91 cm; Private collection). Courtesy Berman Gallery, Turin

Palazzo dei Diamanti dedicates an extensive anthological exhibition to Achille Funi

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