A project of Casa Testori curated by Davide Dall’Ombra
Finissage Saturday, September 21 at 6:00 PM
On September 21 at 6:00 PM, a speech was given at the “Municipio di Saint-Vincent” for the finissage of the exhibition “Uomini. Luciano Minguzzi in Valle d’Aosta“. The restoration of Luciano Minguzzi’s work Uomini, currently displayed at the town hall’s entrance in Saint-Vincent, will soon find its permanent placement at the Gamba Castle in Châtillon.
With: Luca Avataneo and Marco Demmelbauer from the “Centro Conservazione Restauro La Venaria Reale”.
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From July 13 to September 22, 2024, the Gamba Castle,Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of the Aosta Valley, dedicated its summer exhibition to Luciano Minguzzi (1911–2004), one of the leading figures of 20th-century Italian sculpture. Marking 20 years since his passing, the exhibition has also celebrated the upcoming installation of one of his major works linked to the Aosta Valley in the castle’s garden.
This exhibition was organized by the Autonomous Region of Aosta Valley, Department of Cultural Heritage and Activities, Educational System, and Policies for Intergenerational Relations, in collaboration with the Structure for Historical-Artistic Heritage and Management of Cultural Sites, and Casa Testori, a cultural hub near Milan that has worked jointly with the museum since 2018. Moreover, it’s precisely with this exhibition that a new three-year period of shared programming begins.
In collaboration with the Luciano Minguzzi’s Archive in Venice and in close dialogue with his son Luca and the family that preserves and promotes his work, the exhibition leads the public to focus its attention on one of the most historically significant artists in the museum’s collection. In order to anticipate the arrival of large-scale sculpture, two important works from the early 1970s welcome the visitors at the entrance: Due figure sedute and Due donne (Le amanti).
An exhibition that was also the seventh “installment” in the successful “Détails” series that was originally created to enhance Gamba’s collection by leading the public’s gaze on one of the artists featured in it. After Federico Ashton, Federico Pastoris, Leonardo Roda, Francesco Tabusso, Emilio Isgrò, and Massimo Uberti, the discovery continues with Luciano Minguzzi, of whom the museum already owns two works. The monumental sculpture that gives the title to the exhibition curated by Davide Dall’Ombra has been recently restored at the Conservation and Restoration Centre “La Venaria Reale” in Turin, thanks to the “Luoghi della cultura 2019” grant from the Compagnia di San Paolo. Uomini, on display at the Municipality of Saint-Vincent’s entrance, will soon be placed in the Gamba Castle park as part of a project by Carla Falzoni, until then it can be seen on a Memory Trail linking the municipalities of Saint-Vincent and Châtillon called “Via degli Uomini” and curated by the artist Marco Jaccond. The work will then greet the visitors at the new entrance to the park, located at the end of the pedestrian and cycling path created by the Municipality of Châtillon to establish a sustainable connection between the town center and the Gamba Castle.
Works by Francesco Fossati and Carlo Steiner With three drawings by Giovanni Testori Curated by Elisa Del Prete
Casa Testori 10 April/18 May 2024
On the occasion of Art Week 2024, Casa Testori presented Un Raccolto di Consolazione, an exhibition project that brings together the research of two artists, Francesco Fossati and Carlo Steiner, who have in common the use of fungal material. On one hand, Francesco Fossati’s sculptures are obtained from a substrate that is used for the cultivation of mushrooms; on the other hand, Carlo Steiner’s pictorial works adopt spores as a chromatic element. Curated by Elisa Del Prete, the exhibition is completed with the exposure of three unpublished drawings from the series Funghi that Giovanni Testorirealized in1978.
In Fossati’s sculptures, the blocks of substrates stimulated for the development of mushrooms and mycelium are then dehydrated so as to stop their proliferation. In Steiner’s paintings, on the other hand, fungal spores removed from their free propagation and deposited on glass plates or sheets of paper are used as pigments and are governed through the use of stencils. Both artists turn their look to the creative action of nature and then implement a gesture of control of it.
The title of the exhibition Un raccolto di consolazione suggests a reference to the adventure of Italo Calvino’s Marcovaldo who discovers mushrooms in the flowerbed near the tram stop in a completely urban context in which, from the initial surprise that the action of nature awakes, the competition for possession can only then break out. Similarly, artists draw directly from the generative force of nature, but without any idyllic attitude towards it, they are now completely far from a surprised gaze that has instead been replaced by the obsession of a technique that can guarantee its control. Artifice and nature then become unequal in a competition in which the action of harvesting is not an end in itself but aimed at putting one’s own work into practice.
«I was interested in a title that was dramatic from one side but also slightly comical», underlined the curator. «The exhibition is the dialogue between two artistic practices which, starting from a curious look at the fungal environment and ecosystem, actually open up to reflections that lead elsewhere, to the sign/drawing and to the form as compositional elements, creating a certain degree of ambiguity in regard to a close relationship with naturally uncontrollable processes which here become a pretext to instead talk about the affirmation of artistic action, beyond any romantic intent».
The exhibition project was completed with a public program:
On May 4th there was a meeting dedicated to John Cage, the great American musician who had drawn key indications for his compositional work from his knowledge and passion for the world of mushrooms. Cage’s experience will be presented by Piergiovanni Domenighini, organist of the Musical Chapel of the Papal Basilica of San Francesco d’Assisi and doctorate student at the CIRIAF institute in Perugia.
On May 18th a meeting have took place with Riccardo Blumer, architect and designer, full professor at the Mendrisio Academy of Architecture, who presented La forma è necessaria, the research work on the architectural organization of biological structures such as mushrooms and molds, done inside the design laboratory with the students of the Accademia.
A project by Casa Testori Casa Testori 4 March – 28 July 2023
Video of Stefano Cozzi
The exhibition FOTOROMANZO TESTORI Immagini di una vita has opened to the public in the spaces of Casa Testori, the home of one of the most important protagonists of the cultural life in the second half of the 20th century, whose birth centenary is celebrated in 2023. The exhibition was the result of an extensive research work in the archives of agencies, theaters, newspapers, foundations and museums carried out by Giovanni Testori Association and Casa Testori in recent years. An exploration that has brought out an extraordinary heritage that includes photographs capable of documenting the private life of Testori and his various activities as a writer, playwright, art critic, painter… The result achieved is a very engaging novel in images where the public and private Testori are always on a single register: in front of the lens Testori communicates the same energy, passion and emotional charge. That’s the reason that led to the development of a path where the two floors intertwine. A valid example of this feature is the case of the numerous photographs with family members taken in the large house of Novate Milanese that reveal an approach to relationships in the name of sympathy and informality, a type of approach that also emerges in the public sphere.
It’s not a case that the story of Fotoromanzo Testori began with images portraying the writer with his mother Lina, a key figure in his life, who returns many times in his literary and theatrical works. During the research, surprising family materials have emerged such as a photo album with shots taken on January 6, 1957 in Lasnigo (CO), Lina’s hometown in the Larian Triangle. The hugs, the toasts, the smiles mix in with melancholic glances at the winter landscape, so dear to Testori. “Navigare in acque borromaiche” is the title on display, which is the title of a photo shoot made in 1948, where Testori poses with his father Edoardo among the gardens of Isola Bella and on the shores of Lake Maggiore. A sequence that seems to aim at building a book for himself. Family life is also documented by festive super 8 videos projected in Casa Testori’s living room.
In the section “Città culla”, the very rich series of images that accompany the release of “I segreti di Milano”, Testori’s first great narrative and theatrical adventure emerges. In these shots we discover the writer initially in a summer sequence, in shirt sleeves on the Ghisolfa bridge and in Mac Mahon street, and then in winter, with his coat in Parco Sempione, playing with the bars of the gates pretending to be in prison (those were the days of the sensational sequestration of “L’Arialda”), or while posing among the railing houses together with Franca Valeri, who in 1960 had staged “La Maria Brasca” for the first time, in the role of the emancipated protagonist.
The photos by Renato Grignani and Giorgio Soavi showed us the interiors – a real discovery – of the studio in 8 Brera street, this was the stage of a thousand meetings and for many years the atelier of Testori the painter. “8058595” is the title of the section: the number of that studio rang continuously. “Le mie vacanze” is the section that offered a fun roundup of images where you discover a “mountainous” Testori, relaxed and cheerful in the company of his sisters, nephews and friends.
The itinerary on the ground floor ended with a video installation dedicated to a photograph that Testori was particularly attached of: it is the one taken by Giorgio Lotti on May 20, 1974 on the occasion of Renata Tebaldi’s concert for her 30 years of activity at the Teatro alla Scala. The photo portrays Giovanni Testori standing under the stage, while enthusiastically applauding his favorite soprano to whom he had asked as an encore to sing “Non ti scordar di me”. “I felt like I was ‘skewered’ by that photo,” he wrote some time later in the Corriere della Sera.
The section “Mes amis”, which unfolded on Casa Testori’s stairs, is the story of the dearest and most lasting friendships, starting with the fundamental one with Roberto Longhi, documented by a sequence of shots taken during the party for the 100th number of Paragone, the art criticism and literature magazine founded by the great art historian in 1950. However, the list of friends is long: Ennio Morlotti, Renato Guttuso, Eduardo De Filippo, Ermanno Olmi, Domenico Porzio, Giorgio Soavi, Ornella Vanoni, Mario Soldati, Alberto Arbasino and many, many others.
The list of friendships finds its culmination in the images of Testori with the “Queens”, the actresses who have brought his texts in theater: from Franca Valeri to Rina Morelli, from Pupella Maggio to Lilla Brignone and Mariangela Melato, from Luisa Rossi to Francesca Benedetti and Adriana Innocenti.
On Casa Testori’s upper floor, the scene was dominated by the theater through the photographs by Giuseppe Pino depicting the epic of Salone Pier Lombardo’s birth, now the Franco Parenti Theater. “Franco Primo” is the title of this section followed by “Franco Secondo” related to the partnership with another great actor, Franco Branciaroli, pictured through the shots of Valerio Soffientini and, more specifically, through the photos dedicated to the unforgettable staging of “In Exitu” at the Central Station of Milan in December 1989. A historic photograph taken by Ennio Barbera depicting a boy who died of an overdose at Bovisa was the starting point for this intense and dramatic text.
A room has been dedicated to the writer’s relationship with young people. There are many shots in which Testori is portrayed during public meetings, often in schools, or in cultural centers: a video offers some moments of the debate with Alberto Moravia on the “Promessi Sposi” which took place in Milan in 1984 in front of an impressive crowd of young people. The relationship with young people is a convinced and passionate one in which Testori spent himself without saving energy. It had happened also with the boys of the Compagnia dell’Arca of Forlì, with whom he had staged one of his texts, “Interrogatorio a Maria”, then represented in hundreds of replicas throughout Italy. One of these took place in Castelgandolfo, in the presence of Pope Giovanni Paolo II: a meeting documented by numerous images.
In Testori’s studio we discover his dimension as a “nomadic writer”: a series of photographs showed how it was his habit to work on novels or theatrical texts in public situations: on park benches, at bar tables, even on trams. Being in contact with real life worked for him as a necessary creative trigger.
The corridor on the first floor hosted a scenographic installation of Testori’s passport photos, from the 50s to the 80s. All around it, there were the portraits signed by Armin Linke, Giorgio Lotti, Maria Mulas, Giovanni Giovannetti, Leonardo Cennamo, Carla Cerati and Uliano Lucas: all were characterized by the search for intensity and depth of the gaze.
The exhibition ended with the room entitled “Exit”, a collection of images from Testori’s last years, forced to curb public appearances due to his health conditions. These photos are striking for the depth of his hollow and intense look. The shots were accompanied by the video of an interview conducted by Riccardo Bonacina for RaiDue a few weeks before his death in his room at the San Raffaele hospital in Milan.
«More than an exhibition, Fotoromanzo Testori wants to be a journey through the writer’s life. It’s him who takes visitors by the hand and accompanies them through a sequence of banners where the images dialogue with his phrases. Sometimes it is his voice that acts as a guide; a voice that produces every time an emotional shock, just as if you were listening to a page of a novel», explains Giuseppe Frangi, president of the Giovanni Testori Association, the institution that manages the writer’s legacy.«The exhibition is made possible by the continuous acquisitions that have enriched the Testori Archive in recent years, it is an important heritage available for consultation to many scholars and it has allowed insights of great interest on the figure and work of Testori and on Italian culture of the twentieth century».
Curated by Casa Testori With scientific supervision of Elena Pontiggia Rimini, Meeting per l’amicizia fra i Popoli 2022, Rimini’s Fair 20-25 August 2022
From 20th to 25th August 2022, at the Rimini Meeting, Casa Testori has presented the exhibition “Da Martini a Guttuso. Una piazza per sei protagonisti del ’900 italiano”.
How were the great Italian artists able to bear witness to the passion for mankind in the dramatic and restless course of the short century? The expositive path proposed by Casa Testori starts from the title of the 2022 Meeting – “A passion for man”- to give a visual representation through six large works that document the impetus of an art that has succeeded in positioning itself as a garrison of the human being. In a historical period crossed by great ideologies, these artists sometimes start from opposite positions, as in the case of Mario Sironi and Renato Guttuso, one close to fascism, the other a member of the Communist Party. Nevertheless the differences fade in the consciousness that unites them: the centrality of the human presence, with its own aspirations, its own anxieties and even its own melancholy. The experience of the 20th century is marked by the terrible wounds inflicted on the lives of millions of people: it is precisely from this awareness, assumed in a courageous and radical way, that Leoncillo’s work is generated, with the series of his “San Sebastiano”. Marino Marini, however, in one of his masterpieces gives shape through the horse’s leap that unseats the rider to the impetus of the question that burns in the heart of every woman and every man and it’s is the form of the irreducibility of every being. We don’t see figures in Titina Maselli‘s great work, which portrays the rush of a subway train behind whose windows, however, we perceive the significance of a thousand presences, dealing with the expectations and fatigue of a very contemporary daily life. Finally, the great Arturo Martini in one of the 20th century sculpture masterpieces renders the experience that best qualifies the human subject, the experience of forgiveness, conveyed in the embrace between the father and the prodigal son.
The exhibition was under the scientific supervision of Elena Pontiggia, one of the most important connoisseurs of 20th century Italian art and the artists were chosen among private collectors, institutions and important Italian museums by Casa Testori.
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The painting “Spes contra Spem” by Renato Guttuso was presented on Saturday 20th August, in the presence of Dr. Serena Contini, curator together with Fabio Carapezza Guttuso of the exhibition organized by the Municipality of Varese “The times of painting. Chronograph of some works by Renato Guttuso painted in Velate: the archive of Nino Marcobi” still in progress at the Castello di Masnago – Varese, and with Davide Dall’Ombra, director of Casa Testori. Click here to see the video of the meeting.
A project by Casa Testori Casa Testori October 8 – January 28, 2023
The exhibition with which Casa Testori leads us to Giovanni Testori’s birth centenary (1923-1993) is dedicated to his activity as a painter. After all, Testori was known as one of the most lively and controversial intellectuals, writers, playwrights and art critics of the twentieth century. He began his tireless cultural production in the 1940s precisely as a painter and his first critical writings were born from direct experimentation. The exhibition was animated, for its entire duration, by guided tours conducted by students from some of Milan’s high schools as part of the first of four projects called “GI00VANNI TESTORI WITH THE SCHOOLS: PCTO for the Testorian Centenary”. The exhibition and the educational activities related to it are realized with the support of the Lombardy Region.
An extraordinary acquisition The occasion that led to the exhibition was the recovery by the Giovanni Testori Association of an important group of paintings and drawings that reemerged after twenty years of oblivion, works that allowed the visitor to discover an unpublished Testori. The pictorial production is bounded to two specific moments in Testori’s life, separated by a long pause away from the canvases. If the first group is connected to the years around the Second World War, between 1942 and 1949, the second one, which began at the end of the 1960s, runs through the entire 1970s in a dense succession of experiments, some of which are also technical.
On the first floor Following a chronological thread, the works have been arranged along the walls of the two floors of the house. On the first floor, two rooms have been dedicated to the 1940s: from the first watercolor landscapes to the studies for la Crocifissione of 1949, a surprising succession of paintings, with which Testori participates in the formal research of a generation that has to deal with Picasso. The room dedicated to the sunsets on the lake and Le teste del Battista marks Testori’s return to representation: from drawing to watercolor until the first oils between 1967 and 1969, this is how the revolution of the incoming decade is being prepared. The entire lower floor is dedicated to this.
On the ground floor The Seventies explode from the first room, with their incredible load of material: blocks of oil paint that, from Trittico dei pugili, accompany us into the living room and on the porch. This production is entirely concentrated between 1970 and 1971 and it came down from the easel just in time to be exhibited at the great exhibition directed by Mario Tazzoli at the Galleria Galatea in Turin. In the kitchen there was space for a necessary in-depth study of drawing and the carnality of the sign; these works were executed between 1970 and 1974 and are watched over by his self-portrait. To give an account for new important changes in technique, we encounter the large acrylics, mostly female nudes that can only be reached by overcoming the great struggle of the boxers, placed at the bottom of the stairs. The exhibition concludes with the unusual peace of the still lives from 1977. Still white: the background is spread in watercolor, but the brush stroke is thick and full-bodied to hide the crackling of the color that still beats beneath the surface. Splendor and restlessness, as always happens in the work of Giovanni Testori.
Realismo Quaranta The Testori Association preserves the most important group of works created by Testori in his first pictorial season. A true visual palimpsest of his critical thought, in years in which Italian Realism is at the center of the cultural debate and the painters who feel they belong to it question themselves on the suffering of the War, on the thirst for Freedom, on the strength of everyday life and on the specter of Picasso, a master father that they try to overcome without succumbing. These are years in which Testori entrusted his drawings to the GUF magazines for which he was already responsible for the art section at 18 years old. As a painter, he learns the ropes on landscapes and still lives in the bombarded and then liberated Milan and he questions himself on the return of avant-garde painting in churches, arriving at the realization of the great Crocifissione, the masterpiece of those years displayed in the exhibition and the last work created before the twenty years abandonment of painting.
Tutto Settanta In the same decade as the great stagings of Ambleto, Macbetto, Edipus (1972-1976) at the Teatro Pier Lombardo with Franco Parenti, Testori threw himself headlong into painting: the material oil paintings were exhibited at Mario Tazzoli’s Galatea gallery in Turin (1971), then he moved onto acrylic with the nudes of women presented at the Galerie Alexander Iolas in Milan (1974) and after that he branded charcoal drawing with fury for the great anatomical and plant studies that disturbed the public of the Milanese Galleria del Naviglio by Giorgio Cardazzo (1975) and the Roman Galleria il Gabbiano (1976). A ride through the material and the depth of carnal subjects that was gradually presented in the catalog by art critics such as Luigi Carluccio and Giuliano Briganti, but also literary critics such as Piero Citati and Cesare Garboli, to underline the intertwining of literature and figuration that was so decisive for Testori.
Bianco Testori In the exhibition, the visitor has been called to a total immersion in painting, passing from vision to vision, discovering thematic assonances through investigations that exhaust a subject or a technique in a few months. Both for Testori the painter and the critic, and even the poet, the matter is the heart of his expressive research, which in this exhibition emerges thanks to new protagonists. In this way, we discover the central role of white in the experimentation of the Seventies. It is a color that, after being initially denied by the application of large colored backgrounds, when the subject is completed, it often intervenes to cancel them. This is what happens in his famous Pugilatori, immersed in a material-life made with blocks of color, from which the figure must emerge by force in order not to sink. It is the same white that, having lost its depth, becomes light fog in the almost monochrome acrylics of the Nudi Femminili ton sur ton, ready to be later tinged with blood red during the bloody mutilating interventions that characterize the cycle presented by Iolas, for which Testori took care of the layout in detail, right down to the design of the frames. A white that seems negated by the deep black of graphite, spread with impetuosity in the large papers of the mid-seventies. Those are carnal male and female anatomical studies that are associated with plant elements, if possible even more carnal. Papers that appear to be huge photographic negatives with erotic subjects, which accentuate, more than the morbidity of vision, the inexhaustible struggle for survival. It’s no coincidence that some of these works were placed at the end of the exhibition at Palazzo Reale in Milan dedicated by Francesco Bonami to the Seventies (2012) and they are now at the center of an exhibition dedicated to the heretics of the twentieth century, set up in recent months at the Mart of Rovereto. The white, hidden by the “negative” of these papers, immediately re-emerges as the protagonist in 1977, called upon to delete once again the colored backgrounds often spread in bright yellow, as it had happened at the beginning of the decade. A white that returns clumped to watercolor in large backgrounds similar to imposing theatrical wings that allow to see a glimpse of the barely perceptible color under them and from which domestic vegetables and flowers re-emerge. Flowers that were described as archaeological finds cleaned from the earth, or plucked animals, as if they were lying on the marble table abundantly floured by a cook. A freshness and restlessness, as much ancestral as it is domestic, which makes these Nature Morte perhaps the most surprising works of Novate’s exhibition.
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At the end of the initiative, a conference dedicated to Testori’s painting of the 70s took place. For the occasion, Antonio Grulli, independent curator and permanent member of the board of Viafarini space in Milan, Lorenzo Madaro, professor at the Brera Academy, curator and critic for La Repubblica and Rischa Paterlini, curator and professor at Naba, have been invited to speak. You can watch the conference here.
Luca Bertasso and Mauro Maffezzoni Curated by Alessandro Frangi Casa Testori Extended to Sept. 24 Finissage: 17 september, h. 17
ARTISTS IN EVERY AGE THREE GENERATIONS IN COMPARISON
Meeting with Luca Bertasso, Mauro Maffezzoni and Martina Cioffi With the participation of Chiara Canali
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This exhibition draws its title from a beautiful book that Agata Boetti, Alighiero’s daughter, published in 2016. Agata wrote it to explain that for her, the art of that very special father was first and foremost a “multitude of games». So it was simple, unexpected but immediately understandable. Luca Bertasso and Mauro Maffezzoni; or rather, Luca and Mauro, because the game always introduces a familiarity, filled the rooms of Casa Testori with the healthy imprint of those who live art with passionate lightness. There is a word that, in its fullest and most beautiful meaning, restores the sense of this exhibition: fun (in Italian divertimento). The etymology of the word goes back to divertere, meaning to turn elsewhere, to take another direction. Luca and Mauro are two artists devoted to painting, respectful of the daily dedication and discipline that painting imposes. Yet in painting they find avenues, to divertere, thus to belie their seriousness. Luca moves with ease in an imagery that merges pop with comics. The eyes of his characters are curious, grainy, indiscreet. They have a rockish swagger, with those somatic features always so brazenly emphasised. They are fixed and steady as icons, but always dispense a subtle sense of irony. Instead, Mauro moves with a free and deliberately non-professorial manner, despite his role, within the immense reservoir of the art of the past, to plunder a piece of it every day and replicate it. The action might seem a little iconoclastic, but in reality it is dictated by a sympathy that sometimes overwhelms even good manners.
The game of Art then continues (from 19 July) in the Winter Garden room, with Martina Cioffi’s installation. Enamelled clay flowers have sprung up in the centre of the space. They are imaginary flowers, improbable and at the same time sumptuous, and have an iron rod for a stem. Art can sometimes, even where nature is impeded..
One recommendation: the game of Art is such if it manages to be contagious and thus if it is also transmitted to the visitor. Therefore, the recommendation in the path of this exhibition is not to get tangled up in too much reasoning but to let yourself go. Look, imagine, enjoy, shuffle the cards of taste and adopt incorrect points of view.
Opening hours: Tuesday to Friday 10.00-13.00 and 14.30-18.00- Saturday from 14.30 to 19.30. Closed on Sunday and Monday
Curated by Alice Boltri and Davide Dall’Ombra Casa Testori 5 June – 23 July 2022
“For us, painting and sculpting is an act of participation in the total reality of mankind, in a given place and time, a reality that is contemporary and in its succession is history”. March 1946: the magazine Argine Numero published Oltre Guernica. Il Manifesto del Realismo di pittori e scultori. Among the ten signatories also appear the names of Vittorio Tavernari and Giovanni Testori, the probable draftsman of the Manifesto.
It is from this episode that the exhibition Il Manifesto del Realismo. Vittorio Tavernari a Casa Testori began. The exhibition, which opened on Sunday 5 June and will remain open until 23 July 2022, hosts on the first floor an important nucleus of sculptures by Vittorio Tavernari (1919-1987), created in the years around the Manifesto, preserved in the Associazione Giovanni Testori Archive.
The exhibition inaugurated the ARCHIVIFUTURI project, the first edition of the Festival degli Archivi del Contemporaneo, organised by the network of the same name set up thanks to the winning project of the PIC 2020/2022, supported by the Lombardy Region.
The works on display, which are accompanied by important coeval drawings, lead the visitor to the discovery of those crucial years for the activity of Milanese artists and for the stylistic evolution of the sculptor, who was committed to unhinging the figurative. During the exhibition period, Casa Testori also organises curator-guided tours and educational workshops for families to provide a deeper insight into the artist, his works and his technique.
Opening the exhibition is a plaster sculpture from 1943: made for the following year’s casting, it gives body to a female figure in torsion that well represents Tavernari’s modelling before the war, prior to the sculptural production linked to the Manifesto years. We can see a process on the body in the making, witnessed by a bronze version with arms, now lost but published in Argine Numero in 1946.
The core of the seven wood sculptures presented in the exhibition belongs to the period linked to the Manifesto, between 1944 and 1947. In them, one can see the evolution from a strongly figurative depiction to a simplification of forms that gives them a primitive and archaic connotation, tending towards that abstractionism that would in fact characterise the artist’s later period, from 1948 onwards. Maternità (Maternity, 1944) opens the series with simple, essential strokes that sharply delineate volumes. The figures are presented in static poses but characterised by ancestral and imperceptible movements, as in Donna che si sveste (1945). It is a pair of sculptures that constitutes an almost obligatory start to represent the full range of Tavernari’s mobile production during the war, as already highlighted in the exhibitions in which they were both exhibited, at the Pavilion of Contemporary Art in Milan (1969) or at the Rodin Museum in Paris (1973).
A nucleus of three small-format sculptures with great plastic tension dates back to 1945 and clearly presents the slightly later phase of Tavernari’s production. The somatic features and details of the clothing disappear to make way for more compact and faceted forms that evoke the sketch, chosen to embellish the expressive force inherent in the material. This treatment is less pronounced in Cariatide and finds its full expression in Figuretta femminile con braccio levato dietro la testa and Figuretta femminile con braccia distese, two sculptures that show a changed search for the impression of movement, on the edge of the imperceptible.
Concluding the tour is a pair of sculptures of different proportions placed in dialogue with each other. Realised after the publication of the Manifesto, Piccolo nudo (1946) and Torso femminile (1947) set out on the path that would lead to abstractionism and Tavernari’s famous “Torsos”. The artist transforms wood by finely carving it into sinuous forms in which only the distinctive anatomical elements remain recognisable.
In a close dialogue with the sculptures, one wall is dedicated to Tavernari’s contemporary graphic activity, displaying, on the one hand, a series of nudes strongly linked to the pre-Manifesto period of plaster sculpture and, on the other, a trio in which the same material plane work of the wooden sculptures on display can be traced, expressed here in pen and ink drawings on wet paper. These are often two-sided drawings, in which Tavernari reuses papers belonging to the first period, resulting in documents that condense the formal characteristics of this crucial passage for the artist, from 1943 to 1948.
Moreover, as early as 1966, Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, when writing a catalogue of Tavernari’s drawings, explained the decisiveness of the artist’s progress in drawing, where “the pen of varying thickness is used with aggressive marking and tracing speed, on a paper medium that is wet or soaked so that the figure can “settle” immediately, appear immersed in an atmosphere that is not uniform or fluid, but of varying and contrasting intensity.”
Finally, in the exhibition, the centrality of the Manifesto for Tavernari and the Varese cultural environment is confirmed by the evocation of the Mostra del “Numero”, set up in Bruno Grossetti’s Galleria Varese in the summer of 1946, probably at the behest of the sculptor, who wanted to bring the artists who, to varying degrees of involvement, were part of the magazine to his area. An important exhibition that had been lost track of, where works by Tavernari himself and Ciri Agostoni, Giuseppe Ajmone, Aldo Bergolli, Bruno Cassinari, Renato Guttuso, Ibrahim Kodra, Ennio Morlotti, Giovanni Paganin, Armando Pizzinato, Ernesto Treccani, and Emilio Vedova were presented. A team that had already changed with respect to the signatories of the Manifesto, in which Testori’s absence stands out, in years of upheavals, continuous rethinking and cultural or programmatic reorganisation for artists always divided between the need to share and the need for independence.
The exhibition at Casa Testori inaugurated the project ARCHIVIFUTURI. First Edition of the Festival degli Archivi del Contemporaneo, organised by the network of the same name set up thanks to the project Archivi del Contemporaneo. Lombardia terra d’artisti, winner of the Integrated Cultural Plans – PIC 2020/2022, implemented by the Lombardy Region to promote strategic cultural planning in integrated and multi-sectoral forms that require coordination between public and private subjects.
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OPENING DAYS AND HOURS
Tuesday – Friday: 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.; 2.30 p.m. to 6 p.m Saturday, Sunday and Monday: closed
A project by Casa Testori Curated by Davide Dall’Ombra Castello Gamba – Museo d’arte moderna e contemporanea Châtillon, Valle d’Aosta 22 June – 25 September 2022
L’ultima guerra di Mario Schifano 1988-1998 is the exhibition that the Castello Gamba – Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea of the Autonomous Region of Valle d’Aosta dedicates to the great protagonist of 20th century painting from 22 June to 25 September 2022. The artist (1934-1998) is one of the most important presences in the museum’s permanent collection with Calore locale, Collinare, Per vedere, Orizzontale and Vista interrotta, works that are the result of a period of residence by Schifano in Valle D’Aosta between February and March 1988 and that are presented in the exhibition with an unprecedented arrangement in relation to the landscape that inspired them. Schifano worked feverishly in a wing of the former priory of Saint-Bénin, producing dozens and dozens of paintings, along with works on paper, that were exhibited at the Tour Fromage in the exhibition Mario Schifano. Verde fisico, held from 30 April to 24 July 1988.
The exhibition L’ultima guerra di Mario Schifano 1988-1998 – a project by Casa Testori, curated by Davide Dall’Ombra and realised by the Autonomous Region of Valle d’Aosta, Department of Cultural Heritage, Tourism, Sport and Commerce – has as its starting point the Valle d’Aosta episode of 1988 and aims to explore the last extraordinary years of Schifano’s career, up to his death in 1998. An unrepeatable decade for the artist: feverish and prolific years, perhaps contradictory, of hand-to-hand struggle with works, of return to painting and of ‘war’ with painting itself, as with his own addictions and obsessions, years marked by the usual and unstoppable creative urgency.
In the beginning was “Chimera” The major works from the 1980s and 1990s on show are introduced by a video, curated by Casa Testori, which recounts the birth of Chimera, the monumental work created by Schifano during a one-night-only performance in Florence in 1985. A pivotal moment for understanding the strength of Schifano’s pictorial gesture and the communicative nature of his work, which well explains the climate in which the artist’s intention to live in Valle d’Aosta a few years later was born. This is a pivotal episode in understanding Schifano’s confrontation with archaeology, fundamental to his training and also central to his paintings in Valle d’Aosta.
Masterpieces for a Glance In the dramatic months that Europe is experiencing nowadays, the “portraits” of war in the proper sense that Schifano dedicates to the Gulf crisis appear painfully topical. It is a period, since the late 1980s, in which the artist is particularly affected by the media and multimedia. During the years of voluntary confinement in his studio-house, television became for him a window on the world and an obsessive source of inspiration. Turning his attention to the main news events of the time, he gives us his own, poignant view of the war, expressed in works that are inseparable from his career.In the main room dedicated to temporary exhibitions, two monumental works dedicated to the drama of the war in Iraq are presented: Tearful [In lacrime] of 1990, which has become a sort of ideal self-portrait of the artist, and Sorrisi Scomparsi of 1991, the only possible face of the tragedy in Kuwait. In Tearful, the drama of war is seen from the inside of the father-son relationship, starting with a photo cut from «Time» of 10 December 1990, where a child looks on bewildered while his soldier father, leaving for the front, bows his head covering his face in tears. In Sorrisi scomparsi a crowd of new faceless faces are overlaid by the Arabic translation of the work’s title and give substance to the collective drama of Kuwait.
The pictorial reworking of TV images goes hand in hand with the photographic one. Schifano sends dozens of rolls of film a day to print: photos taken of TV screens that accumulate in his studio in bunches and are involved in a process that is both devouring and germinating.
The exhibition presents four large plexiglass-framed panel compositions (293 x 186 cm each) featuring more than 1.300 10×15 cm photographs retouched in oil and felt-tip pen, taken between the late 1980s and early 1990s. They are the result of the artist’s voracious eye and personality: “I feel like a media… Through this window [the TV] I capture the images that most strike me, the messages from the dramatic reality that presses upon us. But I am not a passive spectator. As I follow the dizzying succession of events on the video, I think, reflect, create”. An endless production that Emilio Mazzoli called “Schifano’s ‘rosary”, poured out during the day at every free opportunity, in an attempt to leave an imprint on what was happening around him.
Homage to Emilio Mazzoli The exhibition was also created with the intention of celebrating the 80th birthday of a pivotal figure in Schifano’s career, Emilio Mazzoli, one of Italy’s most important gallery owners and his passionate supporter in those years. For the occasion, Mazzoli has generously made available to Castello Gamba – thanks to his relationship of collaboration and esteem with Casa Testori – the germinal works by Schifano presented and will exceptionally be on show with his double portrait, never exhibited before, executed by Schifano between 1994 and 1995: CARO EMILIO CONTINUA… (print and mixed media on paper applied on board, 180 x 135 cm each). A tribute to a key figure in post-war Italian artistic culture, capable of grasping the value of the artist in his early days and determined to support and accompany him, also thanks to the involvement of the most revolutionary critical pens of his time, such as Giovanni Testori and Achille Bonito Oliva.
Schifano among his nature The upper part of the castle is dedicated to the precise reconstruction, through works, documents, images and unpublished testimonies, of the story of Schifano’s staying in Aosta in 1988, thanks to the discovery of an unpublished photographic campaign of the exhibition and beautiful photos of Schifano at work in his studio in Aosta. This pivotal episode was part of a lively cultural moment in Valle d’Aosta, with the establishment of the Regional Exhibitions Office in 1986 and a particular focus on exhibition activities of an international nature. The energy of the patrons and the commitment of art critics such as Janus (Roberto Gianoglio, 1927-2020), led to the realisation of original exhibition events, often monographic in nature, with a continuous flow of dozens of exhibitions a year, between 1986 and 1995, for a total of over one hundred. Artists were invited to exhibit their works, sharing them with the community, and the exhibitions also allowed an important enrichment of the Region’s collections. This is documented in the exhibition by the Fabbri “Valle d’Aosta Cultura” series, presented in the room of the Gamba Museum dedicated to the Valle’s commissions.
ENTRANCE Price included in the Museum entrance fee
Margaux Bricler, Binta Diaw, Zehra Doğan, Iva Lulashi, Giorgia Ohanesian Nardin, Iman Salem
In dialogue with: Carol Rama and Giovanni Testori Curated by Rischa Paterlini with Giuseppe Frangi Casa Testori 2 April – 25 June 2022 Graphic project: CH RO MO/Roberto Montani.
After the experience of the exhibition Libere Tutte in 2019, Casa Testori continues the path dedicated to what Lea Vergine had renamed “the other half of art” and adds a piece to the story written by many feminist artists at the end of the 1960s by addressing with more radicality themes related to the body and the entity.
SEGNI DI ME. Il corpo, un palcoscenico presents six young artists born between 1985 and 1995, called to interact with a great figure of the recent past, Carol Rama. At the centre of their work is the relationship with the body, which becomes the terrain of artistic expression. Powerful and sometimes provocative works enter the rooms of Casa Testori, insisting on subjective experiences, criticising the painful legacy of sexism, violence and other power structures of contemporary culture. These works provide new and valuable insights into both historical and contemporary art. The exhibition is conceived as if it were a play, with the help of a wide range of media including paintings, sculptures, performances, drawings and photographs. An eighth protagonist then enters the scene, the host Giovanni Testori, with a series of large drawings from the mid-1970s that have the female body as their subject.
Curated by Rischa Paterlini with Giuseppe Frangi, the exhibition brings to the rooms of the Novate Milanese residence, in addition to Carol Rama and Giovanni Testori, the works of Margaux Bricler, Binta Diaw, Zehra Doğan, Iva Lulashi, Giorgia Ohanesian Nardin and Iman Salem.
Interweaving the eroticism of Iva Lulashi’s painting, the sensuality of Binta Diaw’s photographs, Zehra Doğan’s deformed figures, Margaux Bricler’s sculptures or sphinxes, animal, female and demonic figures, Giorgi Ohanesian Nardin’s long live performance and Iman Salem’s photographs, with the historical works of Carol Rama and Giovanni Testori, the exhibition stages stories in which carnality and passion mix. By being represented, the body becomes objectified: this mechanism is the direct criticism not only of the visual clichés we are used to, but also of the ways of viewing it.
The young artists invited, highlighting their commitment to reclaiming the body and going beyond the historical legacy of feminism, have developed works of great intensity, generating an encounter-counterpoint that finds further reflection where each element is a fragment of a body on an empty stage. These fragments of works-bodies make it possible to achieve balances of considerable formal and aesthetic intensity that are highly involving for visitors.The exhibition was inspired by the words on the invitation that African-American artist Kara Walker wrote for her first solo show in New York at the Wooster Gardens/Brent Sikkema gallery in 1995, “The High and Soft Laughter of the N*****s Wenches at Night”, which read as follows: «Don’t miss the incredible “paper story” of a black woman in slavery who tells of her extraordinary escape to freedom». These words are put in relation to those of an article that Giovanni Testori wrote in 1979 for the front page of the Corriere della Sera, La vergogna dello stupro (The shame of rape): «We would not want that, as is happening with other shames and crimes, by dint of talking, writing and discussing about them, without ever taking responsibility for a gesture, we would end up accustoming man to what is not human. The habit of everything is one of the greatest risks that man is running; the negative impulse that wants to reduce him to a “thing” is leading him to it. Now the end point of this risk cannot be a new consciousness, but the darkness and the night that opens up over the eliminated or destroyed consciousness».
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THE PROJECT
The rooms on the ground floor of Casa Testori are dedicated to site-specific works by Margaux Bricler, Binta Diaw, Zehra Doğan and Iva Lulashi. For the opening Giorgia Ohanesian Nardin and Iman Salem will present a performance that will be documented in the exhibition with photographs taken by Iman Salem. On the walls of the large hall, there is a tribute to the artist Carol Rama, whose work has proved to be a valuable reference for many contemporary women artists, in particular for her modern vision of femininity and her way of representing her own body since the 1930s, intolerant of bourgeois constraints and hypocrisies. Intense works from the 1960s celebrating an identity that was both refined and animalistic, and which anticipated a new way of feeling: materials such as rubber, glass eyes, skins, hair and nails are elements that recur in these works, true enactments of her own identity.
My works – said the artist in 1997 answering a question form Corrado Levi – will be very much liked by those who have suffered, and who have not known how to get out of suffering… Because having had a mother in a psychiatric clinic and having also felt well in that environment there… Because I started in that way there to be with gestures and ways without preparation neither cultural nor of etiquette… I believe that everyone will love those gestures more, because they are gestures that, for reasons that I don’t dare to say, belong to everyone… Because madness is close to everyone… And there are absolutely those who deny it… And those who deny it are just mad, melancholic, sad, unapproachable… Because it is like culture. Culture is a privilege, which I could have done too… But I have always felt more flexible to drawing, to a painting, a story, a composition.
A room on the ground floor allows the works to be viewed only from the outside, through a hole. Inside are some works that Giovanni Testori created in 1975 and exhibited at the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan: large graphite papers with close-ups on female anatomical subjects.
The exhibition has been realised thanks to the collaboration of Galleria del Ponte, Turin and Prometeogallery, Milan and thanks to the support of Banca Generali and Art Defender.
Catalogue with texts by: Corrado Levi, Giovanni Testori, Giuseppe Frangi, Rischa Paterlini, Marlene L. Müller.
Emma Ciceri A project by Casa Testori Curated by Gabi Scardi Produced by Dok Mobile Castello Sforzesco, Museo della Pietà Rondanini 14 September – 12 October 2021 Casa Testori 9-30 November 2021
On the occasion of Milan Art Week 2021, the Castello Sforzesco Museums, from 14 September to 12 October, presented Nascita Aperta by Emma Ciceri, a Casa Testori project curated by Gabi Scardi. The work – two videos projected simultaneously – was set up in the restored spaces of the former Spanish Hospital, since 2015 home to the Pietà Rondanini Museum.
Nascita Aperta (Open Birth) is the performance that the artist has created with her daughter in front of Michelangelo’s Pietà Rondanini, the last sculpture he worked on. The daily experience of mother and daughter is that of bodies that, out of necessity, stay close to each other, in many gestures of absolute normality. That daily ritual has been carried and relived by them in long moments spent in front of Michelangelo’s work, where Mother and Son find themselves similarly close in a relationship that binds their bodies into a sculptural unicum. «We bring our daily experience of visiting the body of a work: Michelangelo’s Pietà Rondanini. –explains Emma Ciceri– We spent time with the sculpture, letting the encounter become what it is for our bodies in the home environment: a possibility of research. In the Pietà Rondanini, the embrace between mother and child creates a vital flow that does not allow us to distinguish where life ends and death begins; the sculpture has become a source of questions for us about the relationship between our bodies, and for us, it has become a source of inspiration». «Nascita Aperta is a self-portrait and, at the same time, a metaphor for a relationship in which two lives are inextricably linked», explains the curator Gabi Scardi. «It is also a declaration of adherence to life and form, not for what it must be, but for what it is. In insisting on bodies, gestures, on those rituals of contact and care, Emma Ciceri’s images are objective, explicit, yet interior; interior is the time they impose, going beyond all contingency». «The relationship between mother and daughter, unveiled by Emma Ciceri in the folds of a touching and intimate humanity, is compared with the image of Mother and Son in Michelangelo’s last work», says Giovanna Mori, Curator of the Museo della Pietà. «The artist expresses herself with confident abandon, managing to highlight the extraordinary topicality of a masterpiece that Michelangelo created without any commission, laying bare her soul».
The work, which consists of two videos projected simultaneously, was set up in one of the restored niches of the former Spanish Hospital. «We are very grateful to the management of Castello Sforzesco for making possible both the realisation of this work of great human and emotional value and its presentation in this space adjacent to Michelangelo’s masterpiece, so beloved by Giovanni Testori», said Giuseppe Frangi, vice-president of Casa Testori, the cultural association that supported the production of Emma Ciceri’s videos. «Having identified a convergence with respect to the Pietà Rondanini, with its figures dramatically fused even beyond the last breath, shows how culture is constitutive of individual and collective memory, and vice versa, experience, even the most cogent, is substantiated through assimilated, incorporated images» concludes Gabi Scardi.
