Past exhibitions

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.

This stimulating exhibition, spanning two millennia, juxtaposed antiquities from the important archaeological site of Ostia Antica, near Rome, with the work of two modern Italian artists: Umberto Mastroianni (1910-1998) and Ettore de Conciliis (b. 1941).

Gerardo Dottori (1884-1977) was one of the pivotal figures of Italian Futurism during the inter-war years. His expansive and intensely poetic visions of the Umbrian landscape, viewed from above, were among the earliest and most striking examples of ‘aeropainting’ – the dominant trend within Futurist art throughout the 1930s, exploring the dynamic perspectives offered by flight.

The 1950s and ’60s represent a golden era in Italian film, when directors Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Federico Fellini produced some of their most famous movies. John Wayne, Charlton Heston, Lauren Bacall and Liz Taylor, among other Hollywood stars, also frequented the capital as American filmmakers were lured to Rome by the comparative low cost of its Cinecittà studios, where such epic productions as Ben-Hur (1959) and Cleopatra (1963) were shot. In the evenings the focus of Rome’s movie culture – as well as the lenses of its paparazzi – shifted to the bars and restaurants lining the city’s exclusive Via Veneto, the presence of celebrities like Alain Delon, Kirk Douglas and Audrey Hepburn transforming Rome’s streets into ‘an open-air film set’.

A display of collages by Pablo Echaurren, son of the Surrealist painter Sebastian Matta.

The visionary work of Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) had an enormous impact on the course of twentieth-century art. His unsettling ‘Metaphysical’ imagery – with its illogical perspectives, looming mannequins and bizarre juxtapositions of objects – anticipated Surrealism’s fascination with the irrational and the workings of the subconscious by many years. Even before the First World War, de Chirico had declared: ‘To be really immortal a work of art must go beyond the limits of the human: good sense and logic will be missing from it. In this way it will come close to the dream state, and also to the mentality of children.’

Since the early 1990s, Enrica Borghi has created installations using nonbiodegradable materials such as sweet wrappers, plastic bags and soft drink bottles.

Organised to mark the centenary of Emilio Greco’s birth, this exhibition was the first show at the Estorick Collection to be devoted to sculpture.

In 2013 a new film by the artists Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone was screened which made compelling use of two contrasting but related locations: Carlo Scarpa’s famous Gipsoteca plaster-cast gallery in the Museo Canova in Possagno, northern Italy, and the Venice-based plaster workshops of Eugenio de Luigi, one of Scarpa’s most important collaborators.

For over thirty years, Giorgio Casali (1913-1995) photographed the work of the greatest post-war Italian architects and designers for Gio Ponti’s famous magazine, the style bible Domus.