The myth of the Belle Époque, which still today appears to us as a memorable season animated by an incredible euphoria, is a reflection of the European breath and the desire for innovation that have marked fundamental changes in society, in taste, in lifestyles and in communication.

This effervescent climate, still capable of fully engaging the public, is revived at MAGI’900 in a section of the permanent collection whose layout brings together a great variety of images that celebrate the female figure, a subject that was undoubtedly among the most loved and recurrent in all visual arts in the years between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Beautiful and intriguing, objects of desire but now projected towards emancipation, the women represented in art, decoration, publishing, fashion and advertising of that period were, in fact, innumerable and their traits, suspended between reality and imaginary, they are still recognizable today as icons of an unmatched style.

The exhibition is marked by a rich selection of sculptures, pictorial, graphic and editorial works that reconstruct an international panorama around some well-known masterpieces, such as the painting Il capellino baby by Giovanni Boldini from Ferrara and the lithographs by his French friend Paul Cèsar Helleu, or almost completely unpublished, such as the tempera of the Cento Aroldo Bonzagni and of Lutz Ehrenberger, an Austrian artist who continued to interpret the spirit of the Belle Époque even in the immediately following decades.

The wide availability of extraordinary illustrated magazines allows to periodically renew the exhibition to propose particular thematic routes. Currently, taking the opportunity of the great Boldini exhibition and fashion at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, the common thread is that of elegance, which not only fashion magazines, but also satirical and costume magazines, were able to interpret and spread as never before then. The museum showcases thus offer a true spectacle of lace, shoes, corsets, eccentric hats and fancy dresses, a “parade of ivory-colored paper models” immortalized by high-class artists and illustrators, who interpreted rapids and incessant transformations of taste. Very elegant and graceful, brazen in wearing the first pants, mischievous in immaculate lingerie, swaying in bell-shaped skirts, haughty under huge feathered hats: the ladies of the Belle Époque, eternal and beautiful, come out of the posters, come to life among the pages of books and magazines, they wink from the glossy covers.

Among the many authors on display are Toulouse-Lautrec, Rezniceck, Cappiello, while among the publications we mention Le Sourire, Gil Blass, Le Frou Frou, La Vie Parisienne, Fantasio, L’Assiette au beurre, Le Rire, Jugend, Moderne Kunst, Lustige Blätter and the Italians Margherita, Cordelia, La Domenica del Corriere, Illustration, The illustrated scene. Finally, don’t miss the fantastic costume designs for the masked rings of Giuseppe Palanti, real flights of imagination that still invite the joy of disguise, and the desecrating satirical cartoons that unmask vices and virtues of chic ladies, like those who came out of the unscrupulous pencil by Aldolphe-Léon Willette.

Info: www.magi900.com/omaggio-alla-femminilita-nella-belle-epoque-da-toulouse-lautrec-a-ehrenberger-2

The exhibition presents a selection of 30 original period photographs mostly unpublished by Giancolombo (1921 – 2005), protagonist of the Italian and European photojournalism of the second post-war period and founder of the Giancolombo News Photos Agency.

These are photographic services played between news and history and dedicated to the masters of the European avant-garde of the early twentieth century such as Georges Braque, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio De Chirico, Pablo Picasso and the fifties and sixties as Lucio Fontana and Georges Mathieu.
For the first time this year, as a tribute to Dalí, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of his death, the sequence of the performance is presented, in the name of VITA = ARTE, held by the Spanish artist in ’61 at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice .
The photographs exhibited were taken in the international capitals of culture and worldliness between Italy, France and Spain. These are portraits of artists shot in the studio or in action, during official ceremonies or interludes played at friends’ houses, where the artists stage themselves and that artfully elevated photography stops and returns by filling the gap between the flow of the artist’s life and the formalization of the work of art.
The relationship between Giancolombo and Lucio Fontana, currently celebrated in the Metropolitan retrospective in New York, is a case in itself. For the Argentine-Milanese master, Giancolombo will produce the photographic documentation of the entire work from the fifties until 1968. Giancolombo, through photography, carries out a parallel reading of Fontana’s work moving between studies, courtyards, cuts and holes, through an interpretation that goes beyond the narrative aspects and offers new possibilities of vision and understanding.

Giancolombo (Gian Battista Colombo) was born in 1921 in Venice. Since his adolescence he became passionate about photography, his first shots as a boy are the roofs of Venice taken from the roof terrace of his home. While attending the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Padua, he must abandon his studies for the war front. After the end of the conflict he stops in Milan, where he comes into contact with journalism circles. In 1946 he was hired at “Il Corriere Lombardo” as a “reporter with a camera” and published his first photo, credited with a printing error which would give rise to the name with which he would sign his shots from that moment. But it was in 1947 that the United Press Photos asked Giancolombo to direct the photographic journalistic service for Northern Italy, while maintaining his collaboration with the Corriere Lombardo.
In 1949 Giancolombo founded the “Giancolombo News Photos“, his own agency, to which all major newspapers and weeklies are entrusted, not least Paris Match, for which Giancolombo deals with correspondence for Northern Italy. From here to oil stain in the subsequent luster, he collaborates with the most important photojournalistic agencies in the world. The Agency is at the height of development, Giancolombo’s services fill the pages of L’Europeo, Tempo, Settimo Giorno, Oggi, Gente, Epoca, The Hours of Saved Hair, Panorama; and abroad Paris Match, Life, Picture Post, Stern, Jours de France, Daily Express.
Having become famous for the inventiveness and timing of his scoops – the Bellentani crime at Villa d’Este, Churchill’s bath at the Lido, the Romanov-Gherardesca Wedding – Giancolombo, however, expresses its maximum versatility as a journalist like Tempo and The Italian illustration, with reportages that are the story of historical and daily moments of Italy and the world, the documentation of an epoch taken up with the artist’s eye.

Info: zero.eu/it/eventi/142815-scatto-allartista,bologna/

“Io sono una poesia“, the exhibition about  the art of Modena of the decade ’62 -’72″will be at Musei Civici

Inauguration with a toast, Sunday 16 December at 5pm at the Musei Civici in Palazzo dei Musei in Modena in Largo Sant’Agostino, for the exhibition “Io sono una poesia“. Words on walls and the arts in the Sixties between Modena and Reggio Emilia”, which will be set up and can be visited free of charge until May 5, 2019. With a selection of works and a display to involve, the exhibition created by the Musei Civici Modenesi in collaboration with the Reggio Emilia and the Visual Arts Foundation of Modena, offers a glimpse of the lively cultural and characteristic climate of the two cities between 1962 and 1972.

The exhibition was premiered on Thursday, December 13 by Culture Councilor Gianpietro Cavazza with Francesca Piccinini, director of the Civic Museums and co-curator of the exhibition with Stefano Bulgarelli and Luciano Rivi, and with Elisabetta Farioli, director of the Civic Museums of Reggio Emilia

The “Io sono un poesia” exhibition is the second stage of an investigation aimed at restoring the cultural and artistic climate between Modena and Reggio Emilia in the 1950s and 1960s, a fertile period for both cities and subject to continuous exchanges and customer relations. The first step, in the 1950s, was entrusted to the exhibition “Nightmares and dreams of the province. Giorgio Preti and the arts in Modena and Reggio Emilia in the years of the economic miracle”, organized between 2016 and 2017, again at the Civic Museums of Modena.

Against the background of widespread well-being, changes in lifestyles and disruptive social transformations culminating in 1968, the variegated creative ferment is evident in the visual arts and theater, in music, in experimental poetry, in design, in architecture, in graphics , in the comic strip and in the animation. The convergence between institutional will and individual research reached an important moment in 1967-68 with the event of Fiumalbo “Parole sui muri”, the first national avant-garde demonstration in which dozens of artists from Italy and abroad took part. Their collective work on the streets of the town extends their participation to the inhabitants and it is precisely this aspect that is recalled in the exhibition, experienced by the public in the first person and summarized in the title “Io sono una poesia”, a phrase borrowed from a performance of the first “Words on the walls“. The exhibition also aims to restore the participatory dimension as a social connotation of living in the 60s and 70s, through panels and videos. The exhibition focus is represented by the invitation to “become” a work of art by entering the circle that proposes the “Tribute to Piero Manzoni” of “Words on the walls,” 67, which will be the leitmotif of social promotion.

info: www.museicivici.modena.it/it/notizie/io-sono-una-poesia

“Africa” . An exhibition premiered by the Brasilian photographer Sebastião Salgado. From February 9th to March 24th 2019 in Reggio Emilia.

Salgado is one of the most important photographers of our time. This fame has been achieved thanks to the reports made over several decades to witness the lives of poor and marginalized people, taking powerful black and white images in the most remote places on the planet. Not only poverty Salgado, is very close to the destinies of migrants and with his shots wants to draw the public’s attention to their suffering.

During his first trips to the African continent, on behalf of the World Coffee Organization, Salgado began to learn about Africa, immediately understanding that to find solutions to the problems of the Third World, it was necessary that these be documented. Thus began a mission to which he dedicated 30 years of his life.

The tool that will take him to realize his projects will be the camera, with which he produces over 40 reports, immortalizing tribes from Namibia to Sudan, the overwhelming nature of the landscapes of the Great Lakes Region, following routes and destinies of refugees in every part of the continent during historical periods and different climatic changes. With his photos Salgado makes us touch the disastrous effects produced by wars, famines, diseases and hostile climatic conditions, always managing to capture the essence of unique moments. Watching a photo of him captures and excites us, leading us straight into that place, alongside that person.

The photographic exhibition of Sebastião Salgado, divided into two parts and spread over two locations: the first part collects the work done in the travels and explorations of Salgado between 1974 and 2005 in the south of the continent between Mozambique, Malawi, Angola, Zimbabwe , South Africa, Rwanda, Uganda, Congo, Zaire and Namibia. The second one is dedicated to the reports made between 1973 and 2006 in the Great Lakes Regions between the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, Tanzania, Zaire, Kenya Rwanda and in the sub-Saharan regions Mali, Sudan, Somalia, Chad, Mauritania, Senegal, Ethiopia.

“Universo Futurista“ is the name of the exhibition held at the Fondazione Massimo and Sonia Cirulli. The exhibition presents a selection of the Cirulli Foundation collection’s works and focuses on the central themes of Futurist aesthetics such as the hymn to the creative vitality, playfulness and imagination of an art that cheers the world by recreating it integrally, recovering the words of the Manifesto “Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe” written in 1915 by Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero.

Futurist aesthetics moves its steps from a new way of conceiving artistic creation, which goes beyond the boundaries of traditional arts and involves daily life as a whole to become “total art“, creating a very close link between art and life. Futurist universe deepens this new aesthetic concept through the careful selection of paintings, sculptures, design objects, design drawings, photographs and photomontages, advertising posters and autograph documents of all kinds made by futurist artists from 1909 up to the end of the 30s twentieth century.

Through an extraordinary variety of works by the Fondazione Cirulli, the exhibition itinerary proposes “settings” dedicated to themes dear to futurists such as speed, energy, progress, mechanized man and home design, organized around five units main structures: the air conquer room, the wall of posters, the “constellations”, the “orbits” and the “spaces”. On show, a nucleus of over 200 works realized in different materials, shapes, and measures created by artists such as Balla and Boccioni.

For further information: fondazionecirulli.org

Il Giardino (“the garden”) is a new project conceived and created by Lutz & Guggisberg for the Collezione Maramotti.
This solo show – the Swiss duo’s first in an Italian museum – is organized in conjunction with the 2018 Fotografia Europea festival, “Revolutions. Upheavals, Changes, Utopias”. Stretching through five rooms, the exhibition presents more than twenty photographs of various sizes, mounted on panels and incorporating elements of painting, along with several assemblages of found objects that the artists have selected from local warehouses.

Sheds, tools, tables, chairs, brightly colored plastic tubs, crates, rubber tubing: in these photographs, everything seems uprooted and upended by some hurricane that has just swept through. The post-apocalyptic mood of the scenes hints at the recent passage of a natural disaster, but could also suggest an all-too-human process of violent destruction. At the same time, the images possess an intrinsic beauty. Within harmonious compositions of colours and forms, the small, lyrical details that leap out at the viewer are sometimes connected to the human realm (a round table top that becomes an earthbound moon, a shed cut in half and reassembled the wrong way around), sometimes to the natural one (snowdrops and crocuses peeping out of rubble, onion bulbs sprouting under tables, a sleeping cat).

These images point to the violent disruption of an established order, presenting Nature as an unconquerable force that is infinitely more powerful than human beings or human history; through a process of destruction and reconstruction, it resumes its course and reclaims control over the handiwork of man. Revolution is seen here as a form of movement, in two senses: a shift in trajectory that leads out of a given state, but at the same time, the circular path followed by natural cycles. The pictorial alterations of the printed images move into a world beyond photography, opening up the alternate – perhaps utopian – dimension that is characteristic of any artistic process.

For further information, please visit the website: www.collezionemaramotti.org

An exhibition that brings together over 80 works by Roy Lichtenstein and the other great protagonists of American Pop Art; to highlight both its originality and its belong to a specific climate, in fact, in comparison with those of Lichtenstein, there are also iconic works by Andy Warhol, Mel Ramos, Allan D’Arcangelo, Tom Wesselmann, James Rosenquist and Robert Indiana. A unique event of its kind made possible thanks to the collaboration of the Magnani-Rocca Foundation with famous international museums and prestigious galleries and private collections.

Lichtenstein has influenced graphic designers, designers, advertisers, and other contemporary artists, so much so that even today it is possible to find references to his style in every area of design and communication. His characteristic style borrowed from the typographic net, his use of comics in painting, his reinterpretations of the art of the distant and recent past have entered not only in the history of twentieth-century art but also in the collective imagination of new generations, printed endlessly on posters and consumer items.

The first part of the exhibition is dedicated to the initial season of Pop Art, between 1960 and 1965 in which Roy Lichtenstein icons are born from the world of comics and advertising. The exhibition is then punctuated by some series of photographs that portray the artist at work in his studio. The authors are two protagonists of Italian art photography, Ugo Mulas and Aurelio Amendola, who, at different times, have portrayed Lichtenstein: in this way not only can you enter the workshop of the artist, but also read the relationship that always has linked Italian culture to the painter.

For further information: www.magnanirocca.it/lichtenstein

The Mental Traveller is the first large-scale exhibition of works by Jon Rafman to be shown in an Italian contemporary art institution. The exhibition brings together a selection of multimedia installations, presented for the first time in Italy, tracing the arc of the Canadian artist’s practice from 2011 to the present. Employing a variety of media – including photography, video, sculpture, and installation – Rafman explores how reality and simulation have become increasingly homogenized in contemporary society in artworks that blur the boundaries between the virtual and the tangible, between physical bodies and technological replicas.

Rafman also drew from the Internet and its multiple online communities as archival resources for the three videos comprising his Betamale Trilogy (2013–15) – Still Life (Betamale), Mainsqueeze and Erysichthon – which are among the installations included in this exhibition.

Jon Rafman skilfully conveys the ambiguous lure of the Internet, which seemingly promises freedom and the discovery of new worlds, yet, in reality, imprisons you in a space tracked by algorithms and monitored by agencies that process, then sell, your navigational data.

Rafman’s extensive research on both the Internet and the deep web has enabled him to assume the mantle of amateur anthropologist and digital flâneur. He investigates the epistemic collapse in recent years of the distinction between digital and authentic worlds, between reality and its virtual representation. In his videos, a poetic and hypnotic off-screen voice invariably accompanies a sequence of images taken from the Internet, videogames or online chat forums.

For further information: www.fondazionefotografia.org/en/mostra/jon-rafman-il-viaggiatore-mentale/

Fondazione Modena arti visive is delighted to present al-jabr (algebra), the first institutional solo show in Italy of work by Japanese artist Ryoichi Kurokawa. The exposure includes Kurokawa’s most important recent projects – comprising audio-visual works, installations, sculptures and digital prints– and presents them in a captivating, multisensory setting.

Kurokawa describes his work as “time-based” sculptures, which is an art based on temporal flow, where sound and image come together in an indivisible way. His audiovisual language alternates complexity and simplicity by combining them in a fascinating synthesis. In combination with computer-generated digital landscapes, change the way in which the viewer perceives reality.

The central theme of the exhibition is the reunion. The show’s title, al-jabr, is the Arabic word from which the term ‘algebra’ is derived, and which denotes the reconstitution of a whole from its component parts. In the works on display the artist explores attendant concepts and methodologies, including the destruction and reconstruction of natural elements, the reunion of divided structures and the re-elaboration of scientific laws and statistics.

An example of this can be found in the series elementum (2018). Here, pressed flowers, the original beauty of which has faded, have been reconfigured by the artist and enhanced by means of an intervention on the glass panels that they lie under. These were created using a digital imaging process that reconnects the works’ fragmented elements and breathes new life into the flowers, turning the natural process of decay into a thing of beauty.

For further information: www.comune.modena.it/galleria

As part of the X edition of Festival Francescano, the Museo Civico Medievale offers an exhibition entitled: Lauds for every hour. The Franciscan chorales from the Basilica of San Francesco.

The exhibition presents a rich selection of the various liturgical codes, made between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries for the Basilica of San Francesco in Bologna, which are currently part of the rich collection of illuminated codes of the Museo Civico Medievale di Bologna. Among these we note the series of precious Franciscan graduals richly illuminated by the so-called Master of the Bible of Gerona, the absolute protagonist of the Bolognese book decoration of the late thirteenth century.

Since the thirteenth century the illustration of the manuscripts has been an essential means of expression for the Order of Friars Minor. Thanks to the iconographic and thematic choices codified by the Order, the images of the Franciscan books represented a fundamental element to exalt the figure of the holy founder, offering a strictly christological reading of his life, which legitimized the role of renewal of the Church operated by the Franciscan Congregation.

In this exhibition it is therefore possible to appreciate the technical skill and the depth of the studies on naturalism and expressiveness in this ancient and fascinating art.

For further information: www.museibologna.it/arteantica