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.
Luciano Minguzzi was born in Bologna on 24 May 1911. Born into an artistic family, he studied first with his father, a sculptor, before enrolling at the Accademia di Belle Arti, where he attended sculpture with Ercole Drei and engraving with Giorgio Morandi, while at the University he attended art history lessons with Roberto Longhi. In 1934, he won a scholarship and spent two months in Paris. Minguzzi drew inspiration, not only from his contemporaries, Arturo Martini, Marino Marini and Giacomo Manzù, but also from the Renaissance tradition of Florence and Bologna. At the age of thirty-one, in 1942, he already earned a solo room at the 23rd Venice Biennial. In 1948, he returned to Paris, where he met, among other artists, Alberto Giacometti and Renato Birolli. In 1950, he received the Gran Premio for sculpture at the Venice Biennial and, the following year, he moved to Milan where he won the competition for the fifth door of the Cathedral. In 1956, he was appointed to teach sculpture at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, a post he held until 1975. From the late fifties to the early sixties his sculptures include references to concentration camps and the Second World War in general, but also included a series of “semi-abstract” works, such as the Aquiloni [Kites] and Luci nel bosco [Lights in the Wood] series. His success as an artist was consolidated with numerous international exhibitions during the 1960s. In 1970, he was commissioned to create the Porta del bene e del male [Door of Good and Evil] for the Basilica of St. Peter’s in the Vatican, inaugurated by Pope Paul VI (1977) and, in 1972, he exhibited the imposing sculpture Uomini at the Quadrennial of Rome. During the 1980s, he made large drawings on paper using a mixed colour technique, in which he revisited new and past themes already addressed in sculpture. In 1992, an important exhibition was given at the Castello Sforzesco of Milan, curated by Mario De Micheli, and, in 1996, the Museo Minguzzi was opened in Milan. After his death, on 30 May 2004, this was transformed into the home and archive of the Fondazione Minguzzi, now in Venice.
