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.
One of the acknowledged superstars of twentieth-century art, Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) is also the best known and most loved of all modern Italian painters. Working at the epicentre of avant-garde experimentation in Paris between 1906 and 1920, he developed an artistic vision that was entirely his own. This exhibition was the first to be devoted to the artist at the Estorick Collection, and focused on his works on paper, showing the spiritual and stylistic development of his portrayal of the human face and form.
A selection of drawings by the British artist Peter de Francia made in Italy in the years 1947 to 1953. It is dedicated to the friendship between the two artists who met in post-war Italy.
Renato Guttuso (1911-1987) is one of Italy’s most widely respected modern painters. Towards the end of the 1930s his powerful brand of expressionist realism vividly conveyed the angst of a generation which wanted its art to reflect and engage with the urgency of contemporary life. Rejecting both the formalism of abstract painting and the naturalism advocated by those on the far right of Fascism’s cultural establishment, Guttuso played a key role in forging a style that would go on to dominate Italian art during the immediate post-war years.