A museum dedicated to Franca Ghitti will open in Darfo Boario Terme, Brescia.

On September 23, a new museum entirely dedicated to Franca Ghitti (Erbanno 1932 - Brescia 2012) will open in Darfo Bo ario Terme (Brescia), born out of the will of the Municipality of Darfo Boario Terme, the “Franca Ghitti Archive” Foundation chaired by Professor Maria Luisa Ardizzone, New York University, the Mountain Community and the Consortium of BIM Municipalities of Valle Camonica.

The initial core of the museum will be located in a recently renovated area of the former convent, the so-called Conventone. The new museum intends to deepen and enhance Franca Ghitti’s work and also aims to be a study center, where Franca Ghitti’s Archives will be kept, bringing together various writings and the artist’s unpublished Notebooks and her private library. On the occasion of the opening of the new museum spaces, a double day of studies curated by Elena Pontiggia and Fausto Lorenzi will be organized on September 23 and 24, and will be attended by leading critics and scholars, such as Ara Merjian, art historian, New York University; William Klien, art historian, New York University; and Micol Forti, director of the Vatican Museums’ Contemporary Art Collection; philosopher and writer Alessandro Carrera, University of Houston; Marco Meneguzzo, art historian, Accademia di Brera; Elena Pontiggia, art historian, Politecnico di Milano, author of the most comprehensive monograph on Franca Ghitti; Cecilia De Carli, art historian, Università Cattolica, Milan; and Arianna Baldoni, curator of the artist’s general catalog.

As Maria Luisa Ardizzone anticipates, “to be inaugurated on September 23 is an important ’preview’ of what will take shape as the complete Franca Ghitti Museum. An extensive preview that will gradually be implemented but will already be able to provide the visitor with a precise idea of the artist’s entire variegated production. It begins with an anthology of the Vicinie, which thrilled Giulio Carlo Argan, author in 1980 of a fundamental essay on Franca Ghitti. The Vicinie cycle (”magic boxes," composed of a geometric wooden structure in which evocative and symbolic figures inhabit) is inspired by the peasant communities of Val Camonica and other parts of Italy, also mentioned by Dante, which from the time of the barbarian invasions to the Napoleonic era were bound by bonds of solidarity.

The Vicinie come from the artist’s childhood memories, namely his father’s large sawmill, the memory of the madie and santelle - the holy shrines - that he saw in the houses, villages and paths of the Camonica Valley, and they interpret those memories by reconnecting with the idea, heralded already by the early avant-garde, of a sculpture that accommodates space and inserts figures and forms in a kind of box, so that the void becomes an integral part of the work.

There will also be examples of Franca Ghitti’s entire career: the Tondi, circular structures inspired by the outcomes of contemporary geometric sculpture-painting, but also by the shape of the bottoms of barrels and casks that the artist saw in Franciacorta; the Iron and Wood Woods, Maps and Sundials, Closed Books, Memory of Iron, all cycles of works in which Ghitti evokes an archetypal space-time in free forms, as a repository of signs, suspended between conceptual installation and reminiscences of the past including Lombard Romanesque. In the Meridiane, in particular, the artist arranges on the floor in large concentric circles a series of scraps, that is, metal scraps, that he loves to recover in his works. They are sundials that stand not on the wall but on the ground. There will be no shortage of Alberi-Libro, that is, vertical wooden sculptures worked with lists, notches and rhythmic carvings (the liber obtained under the bark becomes the custodian of the community’s knowledge) that will converge in the Bosco, a wall of modular elements that marks the time of history and provisions, but also the enclosure around which to walk and in which to wander to interrogate as in a domestic archive the forms of existence and the community of men. At the foot of the Wood is the Offering Round with a setting of cups or ladle cups, which in ancient forges were used to pour molten metal into forms and here are charged with a sense of sacredness. And there will be a reference to the Gates of Europe, layering lines of tension, assemblages of iron blades and scraps that evoke gates and wall-thresholds, restless barricades that confront and disturb space. The themes are those of borders, transits and crossings, but also of barriers, on the borders of a Europe of migrations, exiles, integrations, closures.

Finally, there will be the Nailed Pages, which the artist presented for the first time at the OK Harris Gallery in New York, directed by Ivan Karp, former gallery director of Leo Castelli, the merchant of the masters of Pop Art. These are books composed of sheets pierced by a long sequence of nails, which mix the elements of ancient Crucifixions with the creation of modern artist’s books. Other Alphabets is the title that Ghitti invented in the last years of his life to define the universe to which he gave shape by drawing on his own visionary tension and blending instinct and calculation, geometric-mathematical rigor and inspiration, a sense of matter and place, of history.

“In the new museum,” says Elena Pontiggia, “the artist’s works will be grouped, within the chronological path, according to thematic nuclei, in order to give as much account as possible of the expressive vicissitude of an artist who never repeated herself but always invented new subjects, with inexhaustible creative force.”

“The goal that the Municipality of Darfo Boario Terme and the Franca Ghitti Archive Foundation set for themselves,” said the Mayor of Darfo Boario Terme, Dario Colossi, “is to reach the completion of the museum itinerary by 2025. It will be a living museum, which will offer moments of encounter, of reflection, with the intervention of artists, writers, and intellectuals, called to speak also about contemporary art and the most relevant issues of the moment.”

For the direction of the museum, by the Municipality of Darfo Boario Terme, it is planned to identify a qualified figure who will give international prominence to the same, as international has been the art of Franca Ghitti, who has always been inspired by her Val Camonica, but at the same time by Africa (where she lived and worked for two years), New York (where she exhibited several times), and the Europe of Kokoschka (with whom she studied in Salzburg) and Brancusi.

For info: www.fondazionearchiviofrancaghitti.com

Image: Franca Ghitti, Bosco (1989; installation, wood, forge earth and iron cupels, Milan Diocesan Museum, 2005). Photo by Fabio Cattabiani.

A museum dedicated to Franca Ghitti will open in Darfo Boario Terme, Brescia.

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