Best known for his swirling ‘Woolmark’ logo, Franco Grignani (1908-1999) was an extraordinary graphic designer and artist whose dazzling works anticipated many of the key ideas and visual characteristics of Op Art by several years.
Organised in collaboration with the Biagiotti Cigna Collection, this major exhibition presented a career-spanning retrospective of one of Italian Futurism's most important and consistently inventive artists. Encompassing his early Divisionist imagery, iconic Futurist paintings and examples of his distinctive work in the sphere of the applied arts, it offered a comprehensive survey of Balla's multifaceted activity between the years 1895 and 1958, including many works rarely seen outside Italy.
Following an extensive refurbishment of the museum, the Estorick Collection reopened with a major exhibition of rarely seen works documenting the role of British forces in Italy during the First World War. Comprising the imagery of official war artists and photographers, it highlighted a forgotten aspect of Britain’s involvement in the conflict.
In the autumn of 1976, a group of painters from Italy’s northern Trentino region published their ‘Manifesto of Objective Abstraction’. Reacting against what they considered to be the superficiality of contemporary culture, Mauro Cappelletti, Diego Mazzonelli, Gianni Pellegrini, Aldo Schmid, Luigi Senesi and Giuseppe Wenter Marini called for a renewed attention to the painterly process and its fundamentally abstract concerns.
Nico Vascellari presented a selected number of works drawing on elements of Arte Povera and Conceptual art in this ‘intervention’ by a contemporary artist.
A giant of twentieth-century sculpture, Giacomo Manzù (1908-1991) is best known for delicate and moving work focusing predominantly on portraiture and religious imagery. As sensitive to line as to form, his drawings exhibit the same restrained power and sinuous qualities familiar from his more celebrated bas-reliefs and three-dimensional work.
Continuing the series of ‘interventions’ by contemporary artists in response to the Collection, Piero Pizzi Cannella – one of Italy’s foremost living artists – juxtaposed a series of works against our permanent collection.
This fascinating exhibition presented the findings of a group of specialist art historians, restorers and scientists who examined key works from the Estorick’s permanent collection. Using the most up-to-date methods employed in the analysis of artworks, they shed new light on the different techniques used by a number of painters, and in some cases even revealed the presence of previously unknown images beneath, or on the back of, the Collection’s masterpieces.
Fausto Pirandello was one of the most important and influential painters working in Italy between the 1930s and the 1950s. The son of dramatist Luigi Pirandello, his work expressed a vision of reality that was raw, carnal and unflinchingly objective.
Renowned artist Lino Mannocci presented a number of new works created in response to the masterpieces that form the Estorick Collection.