White in twentieth-century art: an exhibition at Villa d'Este investigates the theme

From December 7, 2024 to March 16, 2025, Villa d’Este in Tivoli hosts the exhibition La Via Lattea. Declinations of Whiteness in the 20th Century, which aims to investigate the concept of whiteness in 20th-century art. Organized by the Villa Adriana and Villa d’Este Autonomous Institute - VILLÆ and curated by Andrea Bruciati, director of the Institute, the exhibition presents an unprecedented dialogue between contemporary and classical art in the context of the city of Tivoli and its history: from the monochromatic environment of the Mouseia statuary marbles of Villa Adriana to the exhausted travertine quarries to the albule waters, with their limestone sediments and whiteness. Through the works on display and the constant landscape and statuary cross-reference, the exhibition aims to tell how whiteness has acquired complete autonomy to the point of being considered a work of art tout court. Although over the centuries it has anthropologically taken on often ambivalent symbolic meanings - cleanliness, purity and religiosity, but also mourning, death and evil, 20th-century color theories initiated a debate on how to consider white: as color or as rather a void, an absence. Zero degree of color and creative gesture, thanks to artists such as Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni and Alberto Burri, white has become a manifesto of new artistic reflections, particularly in the Italian scene.

The exhibition project focuses on the tabula rasa understood as zeroing, but also as a page on which to rewrite the artistic researches of the twentieth century - from abstractionism to spatialism, from poor and conceptual art to performance, in which the monochrome is configured both as a code of reduction and annihilation of subjectivity, and as an open space that lives of the observer’s sensations.

The works of Stefano Arienti (Asola, 1961), Gianfranco Baruchello (Livorno, 1924 - Rome 2023), Mirella Bentivoglio (Klagenfurt, 1922 - Rome, 2017), Carlo Benvenuto (Stresa, 1966), Alighiero Boetti (Turin, 1940 - Rome, 1994), Agostino Bonalumi (Vimercate, 1935 - Desio, 2013), James Lee Byars (Detroit, 1932 - Cairo, 1997), Vanessa Beecroft (1969, Genoa), Antonio Calderara (Abbiategrasso, 1903 - Lago d’Orta, 1978), Pier Paolo Calzolari (Bologna, 1943), Giuseppe Capogrossi (Rome, 1900 - Rome, 1972) Enrico Castellani (Castelmassa, 1930 - Viterbo, 2017), Mario Ceroli (Castelfrentano, 1938), Mario Dellavedova (Legnano, 1958), Lucio Fontana (Rosario,1899 - Comabbio 1968), Mario Giacomelli (Senigallia, 1925 - 2000), Alberto Giacometti (Borgonovo, Bregaglia, Switzerland, 1901 - Chur, Switzerland, 1966), Francesco Lo Savio (Rome, 1935 - Marseille 1963), Piero Manzoni (Soncino, 1933 - Milan 1963), Marino Marini (Pistoia, 1901 - Viareggio, 1980), Fausto Melotti (Rovereto, 1901 - Milan 1986), Bruno Munari (Milan, 1907 - 1998), Gastone Novelli (1925, Vienna, Austria - 1968, Milan), Gina Pane (Biarritz, 1939 - Paris 1990), Giulio Paolini (Genoa, 1940), Emilio Prini (Stresa, 1943 - Rome, 2016), Angelo Savelli (1911, Pizzo - 1995, Brescia), Arcangelo Sassolino (Vicenza, 1967), Sissi (Bologna, 1977), and Kiki Smith (Nuremberg, 1954). Works from the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art (GNAMC), Intesa San Paolo Collection, Mazzoli Family Collection, Fioravanti Meoni Collection, Piero Manzoni Foundation, Mazzoli Gallery, Repetto Gallery and Sergio Casoli.

“From the teachings of Winckelmann, who yearned for an achromatic and idealized classicism, to the revolutionary absolute of Kasimir Malevic’s Quadrato bianco su fondo bianco (1918), we see an itinerary that eliminates all contamination with reality,” said Andrea Bruciati. “In Italy, this filiation with a classic understood as an academy is the great test-bed where the masters of the 20th century have confronted each other, who have contributed to breaking this absoluteness, innervating it with fractures, folds, infiltrations, a porosity that seems so close to the limestone component, warm and imperfect of the territory of ancient Tibur. Indeed, the project intends to record this continuous corruptibility of a code understood as timeless and fixed, in order to welcome a phenomenological idea, declined in a spurious manner, behind which lies the tension toward a utopia that remains, as such, unattainable.”

For info: https://villae.cultura.gov.it/

White in twentieth-century art: an exhibition at Villa d'Este investigates the theme

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