21 January – 23 February 2025
Venice, Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art, Project room

Curated by Elisabetta Barisoni

The project room of the Gallery investigates the idea of painting and the theme of the portrait with a small but precious selection of the series of works created by the artist Biagio Gibilterra from 2021 to 2024. All paintings find inspiration from the mugshots taken from 1920 to 1930 at Sydney Central Police Station, already shown in the exhibition Underworld: mugshots from the Roaring Twenties held at the Museum of Sydney in 2017-2018.

The photographs, from which the intense paintings of Gibilterra draw inspiration, refer to the people arrested by the Australian police in the 1920s and accused of crimes such as theft, murder, extortion and drug dealing. It is a varied humanity, with exponents of small and large criminal groups, from conspirators to crime bosses. The gaze of the people portrayed is fixed while the expression varies: sometimes the protagonists seem like actors intent on telling us their story or reciting a monologue. All this pass into Gibilterra’s paintings, which focus on the face and personality of the subject, to capture or imagine what their dreams and fears could have been and to interpret their boldness, rarely fear, and their will to almost strike a pose for a moment of self-celebration.

The over 100 mugshots held by the Australian Museum have been for three years in Biagio Gibilterra’s thoughts and in his endless research on portrait and on the possibility of investigating the characters portrayed.
The outcome is a series of intense and expressive works, which leave the viewer curious and pervaded by a vague sense of restlessness.

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Biagio Gibilterra, born in Carlentini (Siracusa, Sicily) and graduated in physics in Catania, he trained artistically in Venice, where he has lived and worked since 1979. After a series of group exhibitions in non-institutional venues, he made his debut thanks to the gallerist Nicola Valenzin, of the Fenice Art Gallery in Venice. He has shown in numerous group and solo exhibitions. Among the main ones it is worth mentioning the solo show in 2010 curated by the Bugno Art Gallery at the Ca’ Pesaro Gallery, Gli angeli curated by Enzo Di Martino at the Bugno Art Gallery in 2003 and the participation in the group show Paesaggi interiori curated by Paolo Vincenzi on the occasion of the inauguration of the Cube Art Gallery in Venice in 2005. He gained prizes and recognitions such as the XII National Prize for figurative arts “Ruga Giuffa” in 1996 and, in 1998, as part of the same competition, an Avis plaque for a work of particular artistic interest. 

L'articolo Exhibition sembra essere il primo su Archivio Ca' Pesaro.

12 November 2024 – 12 January 2025
Venice, Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art
Project room and permanent collection

Curated by Elisabetta Barisoni

Two Venetian artists, Paola Madormo and Luana Segato, collaborate in this project to continue to give life, in their journey, to the experience of sharing. They choose to intersect in communion, in the real world, maintaining their singular originality.
The project was born from the observation of the environmental and human problems of the contemporary world. They seek to return to a more harmonious and profound time of human nature, inviting a slowdown of the Art itself in its execution and observation by the public.

For Paola Madormo the vision of the world is like a forest in which all things are made up of consciousness but grow only when they encounter the experience of a new sensation: a sound, a ray of light, a drop of water and infinite other elements. The sculpture loses heaviness and weightiness, it moves to the first moment of its analysis, it almost becomes a delicate hypothesis of a future work. Metal gives back every perceived color and the material part forms a network that recalls the design of the fractals and the molecular chains that make up the elements, while the empty part expresses the suspension of space, of the void. “I have always used metal, because I am interested in the discovery and recovery of pre-existing materials; you can find everything through recycling. A few years ago I recovered old nets from fishermen, it was perhaps 2006; I had been seeing the obvious analogies between this material and internet communications for some time, the net that has begun to be in common use by almost the entire population. In the net I see the world of communications/information and the world that makes up every element around us in the design of fractals and molecules”.

For Luana Segato (Luse) form and space are something to separate and recompose, matter to hold in her hands and represent in different ways with the colors of change like a multifaceted universe rooted in her own canvases. The artist paints, cuts, repairs and reconstructs space to demonstrate its immense potential; a thread unites pieces of canvas and recovered fabric to create works that represent and shape places and form of the natural environment. Luse is concerned with protecting and keeping together the integrity of nature, a nature that is wounded but repaired, it is mended but still maintains the magnificence of its colors and its generating power. The eye-catching stitching recalls the experience and depth of ancient languages, between color and gestures, almost graffiti with an archaic sign. A sign that also becomes a multidimensional image.

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Paola Madormo lives and works in Venice. She studied Advertising Graphics and Photography at the ISA in Cordenons. Pupil of master Gian Franco Tramontin at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, she graduated in Sculpture. She was self-taught student in the Squero di San Trovaso, learning the art of gilding, a profession she developed in her own research. She has exhibited numerous times in important Italian institutions and her Studio in Venice is a meeting point for many artists from the lagoon cultural scene.

Luana Segato lives and works between Venice and Padua. She trained at the International School of Graphics in Venice, experimenting with various graphic and pictorial techniques; at the same time she attended numerous studios of Venetian painters. Her journey in the lagoon began in 2002 and in 2008 she established her own atelier here, also shared with other Italian and foreign artists. In 2013 she moved to her current studio, Atelier Luse. She has exhibited at important Italian institutions and collaborates with numerous cultural associations.

Both Madormo and Segato are involved in the “Saloni Celesti” association which unites some important artists on the Venetian scene and participates in cultural initiatives such as the Amaci Contemporary Day and Artnight.

Admission to the exhibition with the Museum’s hours and ticket.

L'articolo Exhibition sembra essere il primo su Archivio Ca' Pesaro.

From 10 October 2024 to 26 January 2025
Venice, Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art

Project curated by Elisabetta Barisoni
Thanks to Augusto Gandini, Chiara Fabbri

Gandini plays a tough game, with his cards open. He inserts perspective hypotheses into curved spaces, into real horizons: the line becomes margin, furrow and even volume; the color becomes filled with concrete […] Geometry, a spatial hypothesis, becomes real space, built with colored beams as if they were concrete structures. The painter makes forms like a sculptor; the painter and the sculptor create spaces like the architect.
[Giulio Carlo Argan on the occasion of the Parabola 66 exhibition at the Il Bilico gallery, Rome]

Ca’ Pesaro’s hommage to Marcolino Gandini intends to underline the most revolutionary moment of his production, the 1960s. The art critic Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco defines the period 1962-1963 as the “blue period”, when Gandini’s canvases are characterized by a reduced chromatic range, with greys, pale blues and whites, defined by a dense and material painting layer. Together with these first attempts, the room shows, also through Tela modellata [Modeled canvas] from 1965, donated by the author in 1989 for the City of Venice collections, the path that Gandini undertakes to explore space and “exit” the canvas. The so-called “monumental period” is expressed in large-scale works, where the support, often made of plywood, is curved and supports the modeled canvas. The colors become colored stripes to create vibrant optical effects; the work is no longer two-dimensional and becomes abstract architecture.

Gandini finds a way out of the colors of the Gruppo dei Sei and the stylistic features of the more recent Arte Povera, while recalling, in the line and geometric rigor, the style of Giulio Paolini. Music is fundamental in all his production, as he himself defines in De bello picturae: «The harmony of colors and the deep syncopation of lines build in space what music builds in time». Gandini thus creates his very personal interpretation of Abstract art and, despite knowing the American production of Kenneth Noland and Abstract Expressionism, his approach recalls Russian Constructivism and Bauhaus more closely. In the mid-1960s his assemblages take the form of colored structures, which Gandini calls wardrobes. It is a very creative period for him and from the end of the decade he experiments with new materials and ends up abandoning color to create monochrome works in white formica.

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Marcolino Gandini (Turin, 1937- Rome, 2012), son of the musician and composer Marco Gandini and Santina Vaudano, from a young age he frequented the Turin intellectual scene in which his father was involved and came into contact with the painter Felice Casorati and the Gruppo dei Sei. Having moved with his family to Viù, a small village close to the French border, he grew up surrounded by nature; at sixteen he was hospitalized urgently for a cerebral embolus, which caused paralysis of the left side of his body. During his hospitalization he began to draw. Returning to Turin, he studied painting and in 1954 became a pupil of Casorati. He distanced himself from the Master’s style and in 1958 he made his debut in a solo exhibition at Palazzo Chiablese with figurative works where geometry was already of great importance. The definitive turning point towards abstraction took place in 1960. Having moved to Rome in 1963, he developed large-format works with curved canvases. From 1966 he moved from two-dimensional painting to abstract architecture. Protagonist of numerous solo exhibitions, he has participated in group exhibitions in Italy and abroad, winning important international awards.

Admission with the Museum’s hours and ticket.

L'articolo Permanent collection sembra essere il primo su Archivio Ca' Pesaro.

From 17 May to 6 October 2024
Venice, Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art
First Floor
Curated by Elisabetta Barisoni, Michele Beraldo

One of the most radical artists of the Italian Twentieth century, Ennio Finzi was able to subvert the informal language of the postwar period by pursuing an unusual research based on the atonal and timbric values of color, representing for this reason a model of painting that Luciano Caramel has defined as “unusual”.

Ennio Finzi, “Giallo su grigio”, 1957

Vice versa, he was also able to trace a less excited path and more subtended by perceptive reflection, conducting an in-depth investigation into the intrinsic structures of form, in an attempt perhaps to tame and “bend” its own ungovernable contradictions.

From this concise overview, we have chosen to represent the Venetian artist with some of his most emblematic works of the 1950s, such as the “geometric” Chromatic Scales, where the intermittent appearance of color unfolds in limpid scores of vertical bands; Rhythms Vibration, where yellow flows slender and threadlike in rapid, iridescent temporal progressiveness; or such as White on White and Gray on Gray, where light is revealed as the spiritual broadcaster of a thinned matter, with its labile and indistinctly suspended boundaries.

Entrance with the Museum’s hours and ticket.

L'articolo Permanent collection sembra essere il primo su Archivio Ca' Pesaro.

18 April – 8 September 2024 
Venice, Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art, Project room
Curated by Marina Bastianello

In the traditional sense, ”Blueprint” is a technical drawing used to accurately communicate the details of an architectural or mechanical design, usually presented with a blue background and white lines.
In this exhibition, ‘Blueprint’ symbolises the basic design of life, just as blueprints define the form and function of a structure in architecture and engineering. The artist uses 23 pairs of chromosomes as letters and words to create a new asemic script based on an analysis of the rhythm, harmony and silent pauses of classical poetry. Through the combination of carefully selected, constructed and arranged objects, he weaves a visual grammar that symbolises the composition and origin of life, the transmission of information and genetic codes, describing a new hybrid and unknown life, but closely related to the existence of human beings. This work explores the fundamental questions of identity, inheritance, destiny and life itself.

Like the myth of the three goddesses of destiny in Greek mythology, who control fate by weaving the thread of life, in the same way, the artist weaves this ‘new life’ by symbolically transcribing the very meaning of its existence.
In addition to personally selecting the physical properties of the objects used to compose the genetic make-up of this new entity, a series of symbologies linked to the various elements are taken into consideration, such as the material, the dynamics of the relationship between the objects themselves, time and space, which will influence conservation and perishability, but also what has already happened and is therefore part of the object’s history. It is a selection work articulated on several levels, from the large-scale collection to the selection in detail, to the search for a compatible pair according to dynamics of contrast or affinity, which, in any case, according to the artist’s view, respect the intrinsic essential nature of the pair of objects created.

Each pair represents a chromosome or the ”words” of a text that does not actually exist; they are like a trace, the shadow of a composition of which there is no transcript because it was not generated with lexical meaning.
The interrelationships between these words represent how different genes influence each other and control the biological properties of each creature and at the same time, reflect the complexity and diversity of biological evolution. By recombining, transforming and linking chromosomal materials, the boundaries between human and non-human blur, questioning the nature of humanity and life. ‘Blueprint’ is a changing design. This quest is not limited to human beings, but also explores our origins, our identity and the infinite possibilities of future life. The audience here is not just a performer, its participation becomes the reproduction and reshaping of genetic memory, fluid and invisible in the work.

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Wang Jingyun was born on 26 August 1996 in Neijiang, Sichuan, China.
In 2021, he obtained a master’s degree in NTA (New Art Techniques) from the Accademia of Fine Arts in Venice. In 2021 he won the visual poetry category of the Artefici del nostro tempo competition by the Venice Municipality and in 2022 he achieved the first place for the discipline of glass design.
In his works, he tries to pursue a metaphorical and seemingly non-existent, blurring the boundaries between concepts, images and matter. He explores the dilemma of time, the contradictory nature of everyday life and the inevitability of death, expressing an obsession with the fragility and finality of things. These themes are not just states or outcomes, but evidence of the cycle of the universe. Presented in a poetic and emotional manner, his exploration becomes a collection of fragments of reality, individual experience, environment and time, extracting new stories and meanings from easily realised products, industrial debris and natural things. His works consist mainly of cross media installations and poetry experimental. His works have been exhibited in China, France, Spain, Italy, Greece and South Korea.

L'articolo Exhibition sembra essere il primo su Archivio Ca' Pesaro.

15 November 2024 – 4 March 2025
Venice, Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art, Dom Pérignon Rooms, second floor

Curated by Elisabetta Barisoni
Special thanks to Studio Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Ipercubo

In March 1944, Arturo Martini began writing his famous text “Scultura Lingua Morta” (Sculpture Dead Language) which was published in Venice in fifty copies in 1945. The work is a heartfelt declaration about the inability of sculpture to be alive and universal. During the terrible years of World War II, Martini, as Italy’s foremost sculptor of his time, criticizes sculpture and questions its potential to be redemptive.

A dialogue emerges – almost a face-off – between Giorgio Andreotta Calò, a Venetian artist recognized as one of the most authoritative voices in contemporary Italian art, and the city of Venice, renowned for its rich plasticity and physicality. This conversation comes from Martini’s reflections, as a founding member of the group of artists who gathered around the first director of Ca’ Pesaro, Nino Barbantini, in the early 20th century.

The current, small but valuable, exhibition represents a journey into the lingua morta (dead language) through masterpieces created by Calò over more than twenty years. From the renowned Clessidre, Pinne Nobilis, Carotaggi to an extraordinary series of Meduse, including the one that entered the civic collection of Ca’ Pesaro thanks to the PAC2021 – Plan for Contemporary Art, promoted by the General Directorate of Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture. An unpublished Medusa, very dear to the Venetian artist, is presented in an intimate dialogue with Martini’s Testa di Medusa, a piece from the deposits of Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art.
From this dialogue between the two artists, we perceive how language has never been more alive and present.

Along with these works are exhibited the materials that initially sparked the artist’s dialogue with the Palace on the Grand Canal. The second room features drawings and core samples resulting from investigations conducted by the Municipality of Venice’s Public Works professionals on the facade of Ca’ Pesaro. The relationship between contemporary sculptural production and the city of Venice is captured through Calò’s sensibility, complemented by the sculpture collection of Ca’ Pesaro and the monumental architecture of the Palace. This connection is further enriched by the insights drawn from the invaluable documents in the Gallery’s Historical Archives. These materials include traces of photographic campaigns focused on the collections, reflections on the display of artworks, on Longhena’s architecture and on the façade. Together, they weave a narrative that intertwines with Calò’s production, explored through the interdisciplinary and dialogic perspective of the collective Ipercubo. Plastic arts, but also museography, architecture, restorations, the static and scientific investigations of materials and of the Palace, all become elements of a lingua viva (living language) that testifies to the uninterrupted dialogue between Venice, the protagonists of its glorious past and the interpreters of its articulate present.

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Giorgio Andreotta Calò (Venice, 1979) lives and works between Italy and the Netherlands. He studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice and at the Kunsthochschule in Berlin. Between 2001 and 2007 he was assistant to Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. In 2008 he began a collaboration with Galleria ZERO… (Milan). In 2008 he moved to the Netherlands and was artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam (2009-2011). In 2011 his work was presented at the 54. Biennale directed by Bice Curiger. In 2012 he won the Premio Italia for contemporary art promoted by MAXXI in Rome. Between 2012 and 2013 he was artist-in-residence at the Centre National d’Art Contemporain at Villa Arson in Nice. In 2014 he won the New York Prize promoted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 2015 he began collaborating with Sprovieri Gallery (London). In 2017 he was one of three artists invited to represent Italy in the central pavilion curated by Cecilia Alemani at the 57. Biennale and with the project Anastasis he won the Italian Council call (2017). In 2019, a personal exhibition of his work was held at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan. Between 2017 and 2024 he created a permanent installation for the Castello di Ama collection. In 2024 he began a collaboration with Annet Gelink Gallery (Amsterdam). His artwork is housed in major contemporary art museums across Italy and featured in prestigious private collections both in Italy and abroad. Since 2016, he has been based in Venice, and in 2021, he began teaching in the sculpture department at the Venice Academy of Fine Arts.

Admission to the exhibition with the Museum’s hours and ticket.

L'articolo Permanent collection sembra essere il primo su Archivio Ca' Pesaro.

25 October 2024 – 23 March 2025
Venice, Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art

Curated by Norman Rosenthal, Dawn Ades, Elisabetta Barisoni
With the collaboration of Matta Archives

Roberto Matta 1911-2002 is the first institutional exhibition in Italy dedicated to the Chilean artist; it aims to portray his eclectic personality and the expression of a wide range of ideas and modes of knowledge: scientific, cultural and philosophical. A citizen of the world, visionary, multifaceted artist, painter and draughtsman, architect and sculptor, as well as a militant figure, Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren (Santiago de Chile, 1911 – Civitavecchia, 2002) is certainly one of the most important artists of the twentieth century and, at the same time, among the least celebrated and represented figures in Italian museum collections.

The exhibition at Ca’ Pesaro is thus one of the projects of in-depth study, research and rediscovery of twentieth-century artists undertaken by the Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna di Venezia, starting with the masterpieces held in its collection – in this case Alba sulla terra – Dawn on Earth – of 1952.

The exhibition also recalls and renews his historical connection with Venice. Matta arrived in the lagoon city for the first time in 1948 as one the artists of the Peggy Guggenheim collection hosted in the epoch-making exhibition at the Greek Pavilion. Again in Venice in 1953, it was on the occasion of the ‘Matta 1949-1953’ exhibition at the Museo Correr organised by Galleria del Cavallino and under the aegis of Carlo Cardazzo that a work by Matta entered an Italian public collection for the first time: displayed in the exhibition in the Sala Napoleonica, Alba sulla terra was purchased by Venice City for Ca’ Pesaro

The ‘official’ protagonist of Surrealism, whose centenary will be celebrated in 2024, Matta developed his own particular visual language; his universe is surprising, complex, articulated, not ascribable to a single language. Irrationality, the unconscious, psychic automatism and deforming matter, the legacy of the surreal, are combined with the fundamental experience in Paris as a collaborator of Le Corbusier. At the same time, the geometric, architectural and constructive component in the exaggerated perspective and the trespassing into the fourth dimension, which characterise his mature production, preserve the echo of his love for poetry and his youthful closeness to Breton and friends. The exhibition intends to celebrate the brilliant and highly influential Chilean-born artist and his multifaceted creativity, expressed in the production of paintings, drawings, sculptures, architectural projects and design objects.                    

Moreover, while constantly transgressing the borderline between abstraction and figuration, he exerted a fundamental influence on the American abstract expressionists of the 1940s. Above all, Matta’s work immediately presents itself as a participant in the world of science fiction, as a forerunner of an aesthetic in which the atmospheres of video games mix with those of street art.

The exhibition opens with a monumental work over 10 metres long, dating from the 1970s: Coïgitum (1972), which expresses the nature of a tireless experimenter in space. We enter Matta’s world with a work that combines Surrealist imagery with architectural construction and the non-Euclidean breakthrough of space. The artist immediately presents himself as a participant in the world of science fiction and as the forerunner of an aesthetic, which he liked to define ‘from Leonardo da Vinci to NASA’, in which the sidereal atmospheres of video games and those of street art combine.          

The exhibition then unfolds in line with a strict but not rigid chronology. In this way the different facets of Matta emerge, amid a series of monumental paintings and sculptures – a forest of animal totems, mythological figures, towering seats, archetypes with Mediterranean and pre-Columbian echoes – that invade the entrance, the courtyard and the museum’s hallway. Alongside them are contemporary design objects, such as the Malitte seating system: a modular composition of five blocks, now produced by Paradisoterrestre and available to the public at the exhibition. And there are glass sculptures and objects, the offspring of the extraordinary Venetian experience of the Fucina degli Angeli.

Last but not least, there is the militant Roberto Matta: art and politics merge in the post-war period, on the wave of atrocities and in the memory of Federico García Lorca, to whom he was deeply attached, killed by the Francoists. He lived the first season of the Cuban revolution with intensity, when European and Latin American artists gathered on the island, full of hopes for a ‘tropical socialism’. Among the most significant works exhibited at Ca’ Pesaro are the intense La Question, 1958, which recalls the issue of the Algerian War, the monumental La Chasse aux adolescents, a large canvas that evokes the French May revolution of 1968, which is dramatically topical today, and the intense El Burundu Burunda ha muerto of 1975, which deals with the theme of the Colombian civil war of the 1950s.                                             

His sensitivity to ecological issues was also prophetic, expressed in his subjects and down to the practical application of his installations, made without frames, using recycled bases; today we would say, conceived with a view to sustainability. The exhibition layout of Ca’ Pesaro, realised with the Design Differente group, has also been developed in like manner.

#RobertoMatta

Admission to the exhibition from 25 October 2024 to 23 March 2025, with the Museum’s hours and ticket.

Discover the educational activities for the exhibition >>>

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Thanks to
FONDAZIONE RODOLFO FERRARI

L'articolo Exhibition sembra essere il primo su Archivio Ca' Pesaro.

20 April – 15 September 2024
Venice, Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art
Dom Pérignon Rooms, second floor

Curated by Alessandro Castiglioni, Chiara Squarcina, Elisabetta Barisoni

Chiara Dynys is one of the most important contemporary Italian artists, whose work has always been distinguished by particular attention to dialogue with historical space in both its architectural and discursive dimensions.

In continuity with this perspective, Lo Stile is an exhibition and a site-related project, designed specifically for Ca’ Pesaro and at the same time pays reference to the work of Piet Mondrian and the artistic current of Neoplasticism. An exhibition of great visual power, apparently provocative but eventually revealing the centrality of the form of language in the art.

In response to a poetic that has always rejected any stylistic definition, Dynys quotes the linguistic synthesis of Dutch modernism through a series of new immersive environments in which light and matter redesign the story of reality.

The artist writes in this regard: “The reference to Mondrian wants to make explicit my statement that the form of language, even when style is denied, as in my work, is central. The installation that gives the exhibition its title is in fact an ambiguous work, which intentionally takes up the compositions of the theosophist artist but at the same time denies them, because it is made in stone and metal, that is, present and resistant materials, what Mondrian avoided more than anything else.”

“Opposed to this, a group of colored methacrylate books from the Tutto series provides further insights on my particular and contradictory idea of style, while the second large room is entirely occupied by the installation Gate of Heaven, where the luminous skeleton of a large door seems to derive from the equally bright curves that spread across the floor according to the progress of the gravitational waves of the universe”.

Thus, the close vision in time and space of these three works speaks of a “style” that can easily deny itself, but only to renew itself: everything becomes “style”, if the disparate language with which it is expressed, succeeds to become form.

Admission to the exhibition from 20 April to 15 September, 2024 with the Museum’s hours and ticket.

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Image gallery:
Images no.1 and no.2: photo Studio Blu
Image no. 3: photo Alessio Pasqualini

L'articolo Exhibition sembra essere il primo su Archivio Ca' Pesaro.

20 April – 15 September 2024
Venice, Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art

Curated by Gemma De Angelis Testa, Tim Marlow, Elisabetta Barisoni

Ca’ Pesaro inaugurates its new 2024 season with a major exhibition devoted to Armando Testa (1917-1992). Already represented since December 2022 in the Venetian civic collections with 17 works, the Piedmontese creative genius will be at the centre of a monographic survey enabling visitors to discover and rediscover original aspects of his output.

Starting from his early work at the Scuola Tipografica Vigliardi Paravia in Turin, under the teaching of Ezio D’Errico, the exhibition reconstructs the artistic development of a leading figure in contemporary visual culture, the creator of celebrated icons that have been part of our collective imagination for years.
His masterpieces were created across a range of expressive media, which he experimented with in the more than thirty years of his career, with a modernity that is still an inspiration for contemporary artists, leading the aesthetic scholar Gillo Dorfles to term him a “global visualiser”.

Armando Testa won his first competition in 1937 for ICI (Industria Colori Inchiostri), when he was twenty. This was followed by research conducted in the immediate post-war period for important companies such as Martini & Rossi, Carpano, Borsalino and Pirelli, producing some of his most brilliant and iconic inventions. His advertisements, commercials, promotional campaigns and logos for Lavazza, Sasso, Carpano, Simmenthal and Lines, among others, were familiar to several generations of viewers, consumers, artists and creatives. They were enriched by works for national public occasions, such as the 1960 Rome Olympics, for which he created the official poster after winning a competition notable for its complications.

In the 1950s and ’60s he created TV images and cartoons, with figures, sounds and gestures that have proved enduring in the history of advertising and international culture. They included the image for Antonetto digestive pills (1960), the celebrated red sphere suspended above the half sphere of Punt e Mes, which in Piedmontese dialect means “a dot and a half” (1960), Caballero and Carmencita for Lavazza’s Café Paulista (1965), the imaginary inhabitants of the planet Papalla for Philco TV sets (1966), Pippo, the blue hippopotamus of Lines nappies (1966-1967), and advertisements for Sasso olive oil (1968) and Peroni beer (1968).

Armando Testa’s studies of the theme of food, interpreted in eclectic and even ironic forms, was accompanied by a commitment to social issues and the dissemination of culture, including campaigns for Amnesty International, the referendum on divorce, poverty and hunger worldwide, to name just a few.

These activities were closely allied with Armando Testa’s unfailing studies of themes that are still open: not only the human figure, geometries, voids and solids, positive and negative, but also specific subjects such as hands and above all fingers, the first organ of sense and perception of the world, the alphabet by which we interpret the subject and the space around us.

Significant interviews and video contributions will enable visitors to the Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna to review a significant part of our history and enable the younger generations to discover a creative genius from our recent past. Not just the Armando Testa who is already well known. The exhibition at Ca’ Pesaro intends to present an overview of his achievement and artistic legacy, with a particular concern for his qualities and felicitous insights as painter, sculptor, designer and creator of endless fascinating images magically embodied in an unexpected synthesis.

With the collaboration of

Special thanks to Gianfranco D’Amato for his support to the exhibition and catalogue

L'articolo Exhibition sembra essere il primo su Archivio Ca' Pesaro.

30 January – 14 April 2024
Venice, Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art
Project room

Curated by Camilla Salvaneschi and Angela Vettese

This year the partnership with the IUAV in Venice also presents initiatives in the Salotto Longhena project, uniting the university with the Fondazione Musei Civici in a dialogue between art and architecture. In the museum’s project room, three events from January to April offer Polifonie italiane, curated by Camilla Salvaneschi and Angela Vettese.

Created in collaboration with the Department of Cultures of the Project, the exhibition includes works by four artists trained at the IUAV: Caterina Erica Shanta, Diego Tonus, Elena Mazzi and Diego Marcon. Diego will present his work on Saturday, 12 October 2024 at the Giornata del Contemporaneo AMACI.

At the same time, in collaboration with the IUAV PhD School – Arts Sector, an interdisciplinary conference between art and architecture will be held on the theme of Disappearances.

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EXHIBITIONS | POLIFONIE ITALIANE

• 30 January – 18 February 2024 | Caterina Erica Shanta
  DISCOVER >>>
• 27 February – 17 March 2024 | Diego Tonus
  DISCOVER >>>
• 27 March – 14 April 2024 | Elena Mazzi
  DISCOVER >>>

L'articolo Exhibition sembra essere il primo su Archivio Ca' Pesaro.

24 November 2023 – 1 April 2024
Venice, Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art
Rooms Dom Pérignon

Curated by Elisabetta Barisoni
In collaboration with Marignana Arte and Galleria Michela Rizzo

The dialogue between modern art and contemporary voices finds an outlet at Ca’ Pesaro on the occasion of the major exhibition dedicated to the ‘Venetian portrait of the nineteenth century’ (Italian title: Il ritratto veneziano dell’Ottocento), featuring the contemporary perspective of a prominent interpreter of our era, Maurizio Pellegrin.

Born in Venice in 1956 and resident in New York, Pellegrin has divided his exhibition into two parts: the work entitled The Others, composed of more than a hundred portraits of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the inclusion of objects and textiles, in which a human presence appears, although not always immediately declared or perceptible. These works, in a sense, constitute his virtual self-portrait.

The first room presents the artist’s reflections on his identity and vision of himself and his personal history. Imaginary self-portraits of Pellegrin’s head shown in profile alternate with depictions of his native city, Venice. These are displayed alongside the eyes and faces of other memories that emerge from drawings and notes from the past, such as 104 Eyes and 1 Black Dot (2011) and Drawings (1984-2002).

While the primary focus lies on memory, the work goes beyond serving as a mere reliquary dedicated solely to the function of memory or historical inquiry. The elements within it form the pretext for a new condition of communication; in this way, the past becomes a reservoir of energy that finds expression in displacement and vibration.

In addition to the portraits, the exhibition presents a number of objects, including Memories (The Corsets), a work created in 2021 that suggests the figures and portraits through the signs of the physical and intimate presence of the body.

Admission to the exhibition until 01 April, 2024 with the Museum’s hours and ticket.

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Maurizio Pellegrin was born in Venice, Italy in 1956. He lives in New York and Venice. He graduated in Art History at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Simultaneously he devoted himself to the study of Studio Art at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Venice where he earned a MFA equivalent in Studio Art. He studied Sociology at New School University, and Eastern Philosophy at New York University, New York.
In the 90s Pellegrin started his academic career. He was the Director of the Venice Program Master of Art of New York University where he also taught for almost two decades. In those years he joined the Teachers College, Columbia University where, besides teaching, he was offered the position of Senior Curator of the Gallery. He also taught in the Department of Architecture at Rhode Island School of Design. Later, in 2011, he was appointed Director of the School at the National Academy Museum and School, New York, where he later became the Dean and where in 2014-2015 he was also the Creative Director.
Always in 2017 he founded the New York School of the Arts where is now the Executive Director.
Pellegrin’s work has been the subject of more than 150 solo exhibitions and hundreds of group exhibitions in international galleries and museums (among the many: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Akron Art Museum, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Ca’ Pesaro International Gallery of Art, Venice).
His works are in major private and public collections worldwide where, as an omnivorous collector, he arranges found objects gathered during his travels around the world, akin to Venetian traders of the past. He meticulously composes antique objects, dress patterns, musical instruments, threads, black and white photographs and other items according to an intricate, personal system of organization.
There is a vast literature on his work, being the author and subject of more than 40 monographs, and his work has been published in more than 500 articles and essays.
In the past years, thanks also to collaborations with Marignana Arte and Michela Rizzo galleries, the city of Venice has celebrated the artist by showcasing his works in multiple institutions, culminating in the current exhibition hosted in the Dom Pérignon Rooms at Ca’ Pesaro.

L'articolo Exhibition sembra essere il primo su Archivio Ca' Pesaro.

21 October 2023 – 01 April 2024
Venice, Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art
Second floor exhibition rooms

Curated by Elisabetta Barisoni and Roberto De Feo
In collaboration with Gallerie dell’Accademia

In 1923, Nino Barbantini, the first director of Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Ca’ Pesaro, organised and staged a major exhibition dedicated to Il ritratto veneziano dell’Ottocento. The exhibition was a great success with the public and received an enthusiastic response from the press. Even today it is still considered a crucially important exhibition, which rediscovered an entire century of Venetian art, introduced many of its key artists and fostered appreciation for many of the masterpieces on display. The event also heralded a new direction for the Venetian Gallery and Barbantini’s work, which during the 1920s turned to planning major exhibitions on specific periods or individual Italian artists. Furthermore, Il ritratto veneziano dell’Ottocento remains a defining moment in the history of exhibitions and constitutes an influential, pioneering museological example of a show dedicated to a precise theme or time period.

The catalogue compiled by Barbantini includes 241 works by fifty artists, among them painters, sculptors and miniaturists, all of whom were active from first to the penultimate decade of the century, which for the specialist opens with Teodoro Matteini and closes with Giacomo Favretto. The list, organised in alphabetical order, not only presents brief biographies of the artists but also names the works’ respective owners at the time. This information was the initial source for the painstaking task of researching and identifying the works one hundred years after their exhibition at Ca’ Pesaro. Partly due to the success of the show, many works entered public collections, while others have remained with heirs or, to a lesser extent, have been permanently lost.

The exhibition at Ca’ Pesaro is a unique occasion for reconstructing the 1923 review, and revisiting numerous prominent personalities from the world of art, culture and society in a wide geographical area that extends from the capital of Veneto to Friuli Venezia Giulia. Not only Venice, but also Treviso, Bassano, Padua, Trieste, Belluno, Udine, Pordenone, Caneva di Sacile were among the places where the brilliant Barbantini was the first to discover works that represented the artistic greatness of a century, which had been neglected in order to mythologise the previous one.

Visitors had the opportunity to examine famous artists such as Hayez, Molmenti, Grigoletti, Schiavoni, Lipparini; artists discovered and rediscovered, who had lived and trained in Venice, leaving precious testimonies of the society, the spirit of the age, its protagonists and its great upheavals: a heritage of images of families, intellectuals, artists, patriots, women, some of whom themselves artists. 

All this comes to life again today thanks to meticulous and lengthy research work conducted by the curators to reconstruct the layout and catalogue of the historic exhibition: this enormous critical effort over two years has led to the tracing of no less than 166 works by 52 artists from the original exhibition, now preserved in museums and collections throughout Italy. Alongside these are the masterpieces that have remained in Venice, drawn from the collections of Ca’ Pesaro, the Museo Correr, and the Gallerie dell’Accademia, together with numerous private collections. The reconstruction that has made it possible to develop significant new contributions concerning Barbantini’s project, including re-attributions – with 11 new recognised authors – and updated technical files – 279 for 60 artists – thanks to the work of a group of scholars, conservators and researchers from all over the territory.

In the four sections into which it is divided, the exhibition thus retraces The birth of a century, which starts with the Congress of Vienna (1815) and arrives after long ordeals at the unification of the country; significant monographic in-depth studies regarding The great protagonists, followed by Life and society in the nineteenth century, a mix of aristocracy and bourgeoisie, city and country; finally, The evolution of the portrait towards modernity, in which the pictorial matter is disassembled and develops new light, arriving at the turn of the twentieth century.

#Ritratto800

Visit to the exhibition with the Museum’s hours and ticket.

Discover the educational activities for the exhibition >

L'articolo Exhibition sembra essere il primo su Archivio Ca' Pesaro.

20 May – 1 October 2023
Venice, Ca’ Pesaro International Gallery of Modern Art
Ground floor and Project room

In collaboration with AKKA Project and Africa First by Serge Tiroche

The Museum welcomes the work of five artists from the African art scene as guest resident artists in Venice during the spring of 2023, where they will interact with the gallery’s history and collections.

The exhibition AFRICA 1:1 is the result of a project brought forward by AKKA Project, Africa First and Ca’ Pesaro which, in the spirit of the 18th Architecture Biennale, created AFRICA 1:1 LAB, Artists Residency Program, an artist residency project that has brought five young African artists to experience the vibrant Venetian artistic environment and, at the same time, to offer their personal creative contribution to the city, which is preparing for the 18th Architecture Biennale’s Laboratory of the Future, curated by Lesley Lokko.

Through the study of the Gallery’s history, of the original documents and artists’ works in the permanent collection, the five artists-in-residence constructed new dialogues with the city’s visual tradition and with the history of the palazzo on the Grand Canal.

Contemporary African art thus enters the spaces of the Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna with Option Nyahunzvi (n. 1992 Zimbabwe), Pamela Enyonu (n. 1985 Uganda), Alexandre Kyungu (n. 1992 DRC), Boniface Maina (n.1987 Kenya) and Ngugi Waweru (n. 1987 Kenya).

L'articolo Exhibition sembra essere il primo su Archivio Ca' Pesaro.

From 22 April 2023

Venice, Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art

In spring 2023, Ca’ Pesaro celebrates the arrival of the Gemma De Angelis Testa donation, the most recent acquisition for the gallery’s collections, and given the extent and quality of the works, the most important since the de Lisi Usigli bequest in 1961.
The result of Gemma De Angelis Testa’s passion for collecting, the donation comprises works by major international contemporary artists. The 105 works augment and complement Ca’ Pesaro’s post-1950 collection of art and demonstrate the enthusiasm of the collector who acquired them over the years and selected them for this exceptional donation to the Venice Municipality.

The collection includes masterpieces by Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly alongside Arte Povera masters Mario Merz, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Pier Paolo Calzolari and Gilberto Zorio.
This tour through art from the latter half of the twentieth century features seminal works by Anselm Kiefer and iconic examples from Gino De Dominicis, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi and Mario Schifano, as well as sculptures by Tony Cragg and Ettore Spalletti. The female avant-garde is also well represented and includes work by Marina Abramović, Vanessa Beecroft, Candida Höfer, Mariko Mori and Shirin Neshat.

Gemma De Angelis Testa’s collection and preferences began to take shape in the mid-20th century and developed a continuous dialogue with Armando Testa’s art. An important component of the donation comprises seventeen masterpieces by the creative genius himself, among them celebrated works from the 1950s onwards that trace his imaginative universe.

The collection also juxtaposes diverse international artists: photographers Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth, works by John Currin, Thomas Demand, Anish Kapoor and Marlene Dumas, and paintings by David Salle and Julian Schnabel in a constant reference to creations by Tony Oursler, Gabriel Orozco and Kcho.
The collector’s taste is also expressed in the important presence of Sabrina Mezzaqui, Paola Pivi, Marinella Senatore, while the international dimension of the collection spans time and space with works by Kendell Geers, Yang Fudong, Subodh Gupta, Chantal Joffe, Brad Kahlhamer and Lari Pittman. The works encompass different techniques, cultures and geographies, all central to the contemporary art world: from William Kentridge to Chris Ofili, Adrian Paci to Do-Ho Suh, Chen Zhen to Francesco Vezzoli, Bill Viola, Ai Weiwei and Piotr Uklański to Trisha Baga and Pascale Marthine Tayou, as well as many others.

The donation enriches Venice’s civic heritage, becoming part of the city’s history and the tradition of patronage, which has increased and consolidated its glory over time.
The arrival of the De Angelis Testa donation heralds a new era for Galleria di Ca’ Pesaro; it moulds the collections along new lines that shift the emphasis towards contemporary art.

L'articolo Permanent Collection sembra essere il primo su Archivio Ca' Pesaro.