Founded in Genoa in 1926, MITA was an Italian firm that specialized in rugs, tapestries and other textiles, and earned its reputation by collaborating with some of Italy's most talented artists. This exhibition revealed the company's characteristically Italian approach to design.
For Tullio Crali (1910-2000) Futurism was not simply a style of painting, but an attitude to life itself. This exhilarating exhibition explored every phase of Crali’s remarkably coherent career, featuring a large number of rarely seen works from the 1920s to the 1980s.
In 1961, Eric Estorick’s Grosvenor Gallery mounted a show titled Lithographs by 27 Soviet Artists. For the first time after the Revolution, Western viewers were able to see and acquire contemporary art from the USSR which, in contrast to prevailing stereotypes, proved to be brimming with vitality. This display presented the work of a number of artists included in this landmark exhibition.
Achille Perilli (b.1927) first rose to prominence as a member of Rome's Forma 1 group, which was active from 1947 to 1951. Its artists were the first in post-war Italy to take an interest in abstraction, opposing their work to the realist and symbolist art that they rejected as decadent. This small selection of paintings focused on the artist's later works, dating from the 1960s to the 1980s, depicting angular and decentralized structures.
The destruction, in 1927, of a number of plaster sculptures by Futurist artist Umberto Boccioni represented a great loss for avant-garde art. Now, using a wealth of photographic source material and ground-breaking 3D printing techniques, artists Matt Smith and Anders Råden recreated three of the artist’s iconic striding figures. This exciting and innovative display enabled visitors to ‘see’ these lost masterpieces for the first time.
Paolo Scheggi (1940-1971) belonged to the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s and was one of the protagonists of Spatialism. This exhibition spanned the artist’s entire career, including his most famous works formed of overlapping layers of canvas pierced by biomorphic or geometric openings.
The Estorick Collection continued its ongoing series of ‘interventions’ by Italian contemporary artists in response to the permanent collection with the first presentation in a UK institution by Eva Marisaldi (b. Bologna, 1966).
Milan’s Ramo Collection comprises nearly 600 works on paper by artists belonging to some of the most important movements and tendencies in twentieth-century Italian art. This exhibition – the first to present a selection of drawings from the Collection outside Italy – explored the discipline as more than just a ‘preparatory’ activity, considering it as an art form in its own right.
During the early Sixties, Italy exploded onto the international stage, shedding its old image as a beautiful land with a glorious past but a lacklustre present.
Informed by the languages of music and mathematics, Melotti’s harmonious and delicately-poised work is revered in Italy, yet surprisingly little-known in the UK.