Racconigi, Levis-Sismonda Civic Art Gallery opens.

The Levis-Sismonda Civic Art Gallery opens Sunday, Dec. 19, at 3:30 p.m. in Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II in Racconigi. The event is sponsored by the City of Racconigi, is conceived and organized by theCarlo Sismonda APS Cultural Association, with the contribution of Fondazione CRT, the patronage of the Piedmont Region, and in collaboration with the City of Torre S.Giorgio. The museum venue will be open to visitors every first Sunday of the month and by appointment by contacting the Racconigi tourist office (visitracconigi@gmail.com - 392/0811406) or the Carlo Sismonda Cultural Association APS (associazionesismonda@gmail.com).

The Art Gallery has been set up to make the works of art of the city’s two most representative artists, who lived in, sustained and enriched the area with their works, accessible to all.This is the first act of the multi-year curatorial project devised by the Carlo Sismonda APS Cultural Association for the recently restored building. The building, located in the heart of the historic center of Racconigese, intends to be the site of a new experimental cultural center and a future community center in which the city can rediscover its artistic, architectural excellence, its peculiarities and its history, but also become a place of attraction for itinerant, national and international cultural tourism. The next step after the opening of the Levis-Sismonda Art Gallery will be the creation of temporary exhibitions and events related tocontemporary art. Both exhibition moments are intended to protect, enhance and rediscover the artistic testimonies of the racconigese territory from the past, in dialogue with new contemporary expressive trends.

Opening the Pinacoteca are two exhibitions: a retrospective dedicated to Giuseppe Augusto Levis and an anthological exhibition celebrating ten years since the death of Carlo Sismonda. The first is an opportunity to retrace the stylistic stages of Giuseppe Augusto Levis, loved and esteemed in Italy and abroad, through his landscapes, portraits, still lifes, and sacred subjects, all characterized by a strong chromaticism. Sismonda was a painter belonging to the great Italian figurative tradition with accents related to the formal postimpressionist revolution, from Cézanne to the Fauves via Vincent van Gogh, the dialectic between nature and symbol and neo-expressionist drifts. The exhibition is divided on a chronological and thematic basis and traces the painter’s favorite iconographic subjects: views of the Piedmont valleys, glimpses related to the First World War in which he participated as a volunteer, evocative Dutch and Russian views, and the discovery of exoticism and North African light.

“The exhibition dedicated to Sismonda takes place on the ground floor of the restored building and presents about 40 selected works, many of them belonging to private collections,” explains Anna Cavallera, curator and artistic director of the Levis-Sismonda Civic Art Gallery. “The upper floor of the Pinacoteca, on the other hand, welcomes the art of Giuseppe Augusto Levis through a reasoned selection of the city’s collection, established through a bequest in his will. The two exhibitions are a due but not expected restitution based on the recovery and enhancement of a shared memory that helped form the identity of the racconigese territory, visually identify its perimeters and export them abroad, to Russia, with Levis, and to Germany, with Sismonda.”

Image: Carlo Sismonda, Men’s Square (1997, India ink on paper, 30×22 cm)

Racconigi, Levis-Sismonda Civic Art Gallery opens.

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