Turin's GAM devotes an exhibition to Italian sculpture between 1940 and 1980

The GAM - Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea of Turin presents from April 4 to September 10, 2023 the exhibition Viaggio al termine della statuaria. Italian Sculpture 1940-1980 from the GAM Collections, with which the museum intends to continue the reconnaissance of its heritage by devoting a chapter specifically to Italian sculpture between 1940 and 1980. Curated by Riccardo Passoni, the exhibition displays fifty works created by forty artists active during this period: forty years marked by changes and strong stylistic shocks both in terms of subjects and techniques, and which gave a new role to sculpture.

GAM’s rich collection, in addition to the works of sculpture acquired over time by the museum, has been able to count over the years on the decisive role of the Guido and Ettore De Fornaris Foundation and the CRT Foundation for Modern and Contemporary Art, which have contributed important acquisitions to increase the collection.

“I am pleased that GAM is inaugurating an exhibition dedicated to Italian sculptures made in crucial years of the 20th century that are present in its collections,” commented Piergiorgio Re, president of the Guido and Ettore de Fornaris Foundation. “Sculpture is an area to which the De Fornaris Foundation has always paid special attention, increasing the museum’s collections in this sector as well. This is demonstrated on the one hand by the conspicuous number of works acquired and exhibited on the occasion, and on the other by the presence of masterpieces by Tony Cragg and Giuseppe Penone produced by us in later years, placed in front of the Olympic Stadium and the Civic Gallery as a gift to the city.”

“The presence of numerous sculptures owned by Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT - from Consagra’s large bronze to Valentini’s terracottas - in an exhibition that traces the central forty years of the twentieth century, confirms the value of the collecting choices made over time in favor of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea of Turin with the intention of implementing and completing its collections,” said Luisa Papotti, President Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT.

The itinerary in the exhibition begins with a comparison between the female figures of the Portrait of Eve by Edoardo Rubino, sculptor of the Savoy family and Senator of the Kingdom, and the expressionism of The Madwoman by Sandro Cherchi, and then continues by evoking the many declinations of Italian informal sculpture. This first part attests to how, around 1945 and in the years that followed, with few exceptions, sculpture began to face a series of major turning points: it attempted to move away from a monumental, or ornamental, or portrait setting dimension or thought, whether celebratory or private, and approach new subjects and experimental techniques. To illustrate the new course of sculpture in this period, in addition to Cherchi and Giuseppe Tarantino, the terracottas of Leoncillo, the dynamic bronzes of Umberto Mastroianni and Pietro Consagra, the irons of Franco Garelli, Nino Franchina, and the assemblages of Ettore Colla find their place. Also camping out in the exhibition are Marino Marini’s dramatic wooden group de Miracolo (Holocaust) and Lucio Fontana’s large metal Spatial Concept by Lucio Fontana, counterbalanced by Fausto Melotti’s ceramic Donnine.

The 1960s are represented by works by Giuseppe Uncini, Nicola Carrino, Pietro Gallina, and Mario Ceroli, among others, with works that experiment with heterogeneous materials.

With his 1966 nature carpet La Zuccaia, Piero Gilardi, who recently passed away and to whom GAM wants to pay an affectionate tribute, arrives at an unprecedented soft sculpture, in colored polyurethane foam, with which he addresses the nature/artifice theme and at the same time denounces the commodification of the environment. The combination of art/nature is more than addressed by the protagonists ofArte Povera: from Working on Trees, Maritime Alps by Giuseppe Penone, to Untitled by Giovanni Anselmo, to the chemical-physical processes proposed by Gilberto Zorio.

The exhibition concludes with the last experiences of the 1970s-early 1980s. Michelangelo Pistoletto left the season of Oggetti in meno in favor of mirroring works, absorbing the surrounding space as in Raggiera di specchiera of 1973 - 1976, and Nanda Vigo, with the intention of investigating a new perceptual outcome, proposed in 1976 Exoteric Gate, in glass iron and neon: a reconnection of space, altered by a geometric and luminous installation.

The reappropriation of sculpture, after the conceptual and poverist season (but treasuring it) will be reactivated with terracotta by Giuseppe Spagnulo and Nanni Valentini, with plaster by Paolo Icaro, according to different paradigms, to reach the monumental triumph of Luigi Mainolfi’s La Campana plastic research.

As director Riccardo Passoni, curator of the exhibition, writes in the critical text, “In this forty years of ’observation,’ the plastic act has gone through modeling, sculpting, assembling, forging, and architecting; it has confronted tradition and its erasure; it has reset the question of color. Sculpture has, in fact, set itself new ethical and aesthetic goals and experimented with forms in the making. That is, it has freed itself from the constraints of the subject, from an established iconography. It has confronted itself with innovative considerations in the work/space relationship. It has thus first excluded and then re-approached monumentality (understood in an anti-monumental sense): it has faced all possible changes of scale, without celebratory complexes. He rediscovered, after the historical avant-gardes, assemblage techniques and object solutions. It experimented with new conditions of relationship with nature. He rediscovered, finally, new regions of being, succeeding formidably in freeing himself from the famous verdict published by the great Arturo Martini, in La scultura lingua morta (Sculpture Dead Language) of 1945, which made the bitter point about the constraints of representation granted to this technique, and the limits of its capacity for experimentation, referring in particular to the statue, imprisoned as ’immobile in the centuries, aulic and priestly language, symbolic writing incapable of unfolding in everyday motions.’ ’ Verdict, however, that issued an equally strong, predictive warning: ’let no more be confused with the apparent life in a statue, the true life of sculpture.’”

The artists featured with their works in the exhibition: Giovanni Anselmo (Borgo Franco d’Ivrea (Turin), 1934); Mirko Basaldella (Udine, 1910 - Cambridge (Massachusetts, USA), 1969); Alighiero Boetti (Turin, 1940 - Rome, 1994); Eugenio Carmi (Genoa, 1920 - Lugano (Switzerland), 2016); Nicola Carrino (Taranto, 1932 - Rome, 2018); Mario Ceroli (Castel Frentano (Chieti), 1938); Sandro Cherchi (Genoa, 1911 - Turin, 1998); Ettore Colla (Parma, 1896 - Rome, 1968); Pietro Consagra (Mazara del Vallo (Trapani), 1920 - Milan, 2005); Riccardo Cordero (Alba (Cuneo), 1942); Dadamaino (Edoarda Emilia Maino) (Milan, 1930 - 2004); Agenore Fabbri (Quarrata (Pistoia), 1911 - Savona, 1998); Piero Fogliati (Canelli (Asti), 1930 - Turin, 2016); Lucio Fontana (Rosario di Santa Fe (Argentina), 1899 - Comabbio (Varese), 1968); Nino Franchina (Palmanova (Udine), 1912 - Rome, 1987); Pietro Gallina (Turin, 1937); Franco Garelli (Turin, 1909 - 1973); Piero Gilardi (Turin, 1942 - 2023); Paolo Icaro (Paolo Chissotti) (Turin, 1936); Leoncillo (Leonardi Leoncillo) (Spoleto, 1915 - Rome, 1968); Carlo Lorenzetti (Rome, 1934); Luigi Mainolfi (Rotondi (Avellino), 1948); Marino Marini (Pistoia, 1901 - Viareggio (Lucca), 1980); Marcello Mascherini (Udine, 1906 - Padua, 1983); Umberto Mastroianni (Fontana Liri (Frosinone), 1910 - Marino (Rome), 1998); Eliseo Mattiacci (Cagli (Pesaro and Urbino), 1940 - Fossombrone (Pesaro and Urbino), 2019); Fausto Melotti (Rovereto (Trento), 1901- Milan, 1986); Mario Negri (Tirano (Sondrio), 1916 - Milan, 1987); Claudio Parmiggiani (Luzzara (Reggio Emilia), 1943); Giuseppe Penone (Garessio (Cuneo), 1947); Gianni Piacentino (Coazze (TO), 1941); Vettor Pisani (Bari, 1934 - Rome, 2011); Michelangelo Pistoletto (Biella, 1933); Edoardo Rubino (Turin, 1871 -1954); Giuseppe Spagnulo (Grottaglie (Taranto), 1936 - 2016); Giuseppe Tarantino (Palermo, 1916 - Rivalba (Turin), 1999); Giuseppe Uncini (Fabriano, 1929 - Trevi, 2008); Nanni Valentini (Sant’Angelo in Vado (Pesaro and Urbino), 1932 - Vimercate (Milan), 1985); Nanda Vigo (Milan, 1936 -2020); Gilberto Zorio (Andorno Micca (BI), 1944).

For info: https://www.gamtorino.it/it/

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Image: Lucio Fontana, Spatial Concept (1952; eight painted iron elements; purchased from the artist, Milan, 1965)

Turin's GAM devotes an exhibition to Italian sculpture between 1940 and 1980

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