Curated by Casa Testori
With scientific supervision of Elena Pontiggia
Rimini, Meeting per l’amicizia fra i Popoli 2022, Rimini’s Fair
20-25 agosto 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.
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.
