The FUTURAMA project concludes the exhibition trilogy launched by the museum with Sensorama and Diorama, a cycle dedicated to the ways in which human beings construct their relationship with reality, the environment, and time. After addressing perception as a cognitive structure and post-natural ecologies and the relationship between human and non-human, this new chapter focuses on the imagination of the future as a cultural, political, and emotional construction.

The title of the exhibition takes its cue from Futurama, the exhibition organized by General Motors for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Visited by around five million people, it proposed an idealized image of the America of the future through large-scale models designed by Norman Bel Geddes. In that representation, tomorrow took the form of rational cities crossed by skyscrapers and elevated highways, organized around the automobile and faith in technology. It was an orderly, conflict-free urban model built as a promise of prosperity and control.

The MAN exhibition starts from that vision in order to question the historical period in which progress seemed inevitable and universally desirable. In the postwar period, economic growth, scientific achievements, and technological acceleration fostered a widespread belief in emancipation from material and biological limits. The space race, industrial automation, and the birth of computing contributed to the formation of a collective imaginary based on the idea of a future capable of guaranteeing well-being and development.

According to the exhibition path, that confidence also translated into a widespread aesthetic of the future that crossed art, design, architecture, fashion, and popular culture. In the visual arts, experimentation involved industrial materials and new conceptions of space. Among the examples cited are Gino Marotta’s methacrylate bestiary, Giulio Turcato’s Superfici lunari, and Lucio Fontana’s Concetti spaziali.

The exhibition thus reconstructs a historical season characterized by a radical faith in progress, interpreted as a true aesthetic utopia. Technology was conceived as a means of liberation from labor, deprivation, and even death. At the same time, the exhibition progressively highlights the contradictions generated by that very model of development. The dynamics that fueled modernist optimism also produced new forms of inequality, alienation, and ecological fragility. According to the curatorial framework, intensive industrial expansion, uncontrolled urban growth, and total reliance on technology generated environmental and social consequences that the utopia of progress had failed to foresee.

Within this context, Futurama reads the present as the expression of a paradox typical of hypermodernity: an age marked by constant acceleration, informational overload, and rapid transformation, capable of generating both enthusiasm and loss of control. From this emerges the concept of “nostalgia for the future,” formulated by the exhibition as an emotional tension toward a better tomorrow in a time marked by uncertainty. According to the curatorial project, this is not nostalgia for the past, but for the loss of that collective faith in change that had shaped much of the twentieth century.

Through a path interweaving technological utopias, aesthetics of progress, and critical visions of the contemporary, the exhibition offers a reflection on the possibility of imagining new future scenarios. Its declared aim is to reopen a space for discussion around the idea of the future as a collective construction rather than merely an abstract or dystopian projection.

Artists featured in the exhibition include Valerio Adami, Vincenzo Agnetti, Enrico Baj, Agostino Bonalumi, Davide Boriani, Fabrizio Dusi, Mario Schifano, Lucio Fontana, Piero Gilardi, Pietro Gallina, Gianni Colombo, Sergio Lombardo, Gino Marotta, Pino Pascali, Giulio Turcato, and Grazia Varisco.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with critical contributions by Carlo Antonelli, Paolo Campiglio, and Michela Gattermayer.

Exhibition website

“Citation” means the reappearance of pre-existing elements: themes, images, or ideas that return in different works, from literature and cinema to the visual arts. In this sense, the whole history of art can be seen as an ongoing dialogue with the past, made up of echoes, reinterpretations, and homages. Starting from the most ancient representations, the earliest sources, a chain of references and close dialogues unfolds, sometimes with significant variations, sometimes with more or less declared or hidden references.

Through eight sections, the exhibition explores this mechanism of historical recurrences, showing how artists engage with those who came before them. Great masters and great heirs.

The exhibition brings together works by major masters who have cited others or have themselves been cited.

Among the contemporary artists featured are Giorgio de Chirico, Felice Casorati, Filippo de Pisis, Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol, Tano Festa, Giulio Paolini, Mario Schifano, Gino Marotta, Luigi Ontani, among others.

Gino Marotta is represented in the exhibition by three works from the “Amore mio” cycle:

Carlotta Chabert, 1970, citing Hayez’s Venere che scherza con due colombe,

Bagnante, 1969, as a tribute to Ingres’s La Bagneuse,

Venere artificiale, 1971, based on Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Venere e amore che reca il favo di miele.

Exhibition website

The exhibition brings together around fifty works created from the early 1960s onward by that group of artists, belonging to the same generation, whom the great art historian and critic Maurizio Calvesi gathered, in the mid-1960s, under the name of the School of Piazza del Popolo.

The artistic investigations begun in the late 1950s, with a view to moving beyond Informal art, by Pino Pascali, Franco Angeli, Gianfranco Baruchello, Mario Ceroli, Claudio Cintoli, Tano Festa, Giosetta Fioroni, Jannis Kounellis, Sergio Lombardo, Renato Mambor, Gino Marotta, Fabio Mauri, Mimmo Rotella, Mario Schifano, and Cesare Tacchi, represented one of the most important moments in the renewal of Italian art in the postwar period.

Neo-figurative, Neo-realist, and Pop artists are some of the labels used to define the work of Italian artists, often aligning them with what was happening in the same years in England, France, and America. Yet while artists from different countries all drew on images from the press, cinema, and street advertising, their attitudes and working methods differed greatly among British, American, French, and Italian artists.

One of the exhibition’s aims is precisely to emphasize these substantial differences between the works of Italian artists and those of artists from other countries, starting from the example of Pino Pascali, who worked first in advertising and then gave life to a fantastic and visionary universe populated by toy weapons, seas in a room, and prehistoric animals, revealing a characteristically Italian inclination toward creativity and a constructive bricoleur attitude, features entirely absent above all in the work of American artists, who were more interested in the serial repetition of subjects taken from mass media.

According to Calvesi, serial repetition intensified the presence of the image while emptying it of meaning and cancelling its drama in a levelling process akin to the flattening of television news. Italian artists, by contrast, confronted the circulation of images and their coercive consumption and, in most cases, created works that expressed a critical attitude toward consumer society.

Finally, a word should also be said about the exhibition venue itself: from the very central Piazza del Popolo, where these artists gathered in the early 1960s, to the Roman periphery of Corviale.

The exhibition, on view until 21 June 2026, will be accompanied by a catalogue published by Luni Editrice, Milan.

Exhibition website

“Everything has two aspects: one current, the one we almost always see and which men in general see; the other the spectral or metaphysical, which only rare individuals can see in moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical abstraction, just as certain bodies concealed by matter impenetrable to sunlight can appear only under the power of artificial lights such as X-rays.”

A major exhibition at Palazzo Reale and three “exhibition chapters” in three major Milanese museums, together with a multidisciplinary program of initiatives for the city: Metafisica/Metafisiche is the project curated by Vincenzo Trione, placing the masters of Metaphysical art in dialogue with international “heirs” and with “pupils” of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The project, promoted by the Ministry of Culture and the Municipality of Milan, is produced by Palazzo Reale, Museo del Novecento, Grande Brera-Palazzo Citterio, and Gallerie d’Italia, together with the publishing house Electa, and is part of the cultural program of the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.

The exhibition Modernity and Melancholy at Palazzo Reale benefits from the scientific collaboration of the Giorgio and Isa de Chirico Foundation and the Museo Morandi, and from the participation of the Alberto Savinio Archive and the Carlo Carrà Archive.

At Palazzo Reale, more than 400 works are on view, including paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings, design objects, architectural models and maquettes, illustrations, comics, magazines, videos, and vinyl records, with national and international loans from more than 150 public and private institutions, galleries, archives, and prestigious private collections.

From the protagonists of the historic group born in Ferrara in 1917—Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Savinio, Carlo Carrà, Filippo de Pisis, and Giorgio Morandi—to the artists in Europe and America who absorbed the atmospheres and solutions of the movement, and finally to contemporary echoes with works by a range of later authors, including Gino Marotta.

Exhibition website

One of the most anticipated events on the Italian art scene returns: Roma Arte in Nuvola, the International Fair of Modern and Contemporary Art, now in its fifth edition. From 21 to 23 November 2025, the spaces of La Nuvola, designed by Massimiliano Fuksas, will host a rich program of exhibitions, talks, events, and performances in which artists, gallerists, curators, and art lovers can meet and exchange ideas during one of the major cultural events of the autumn season.

Conceived and organized by Alessandro Nicosia, with artistic direction by Adriana Polveroni and promoted by EUR S.p.A., Roma Arte in Nuvola benefits from the active participation of the Ministry of Culture, Roma Capitale, and the Lazio Region, as well as the patronage of the Dicastery for Evangelization of Vatican City, and is organized and produced by C.O.R. Creare Organizzare Realizzare together with Costruire Cultura.

Among the special projects animating the fifth edition of Roma Arte in Nuvola is the exhibition dedicated to Gino Marotta, Universo Naturale-Artificiale (in Nuvola), curated by Andrea Viliani and realized in collaboration with the Gino Marotta Archive. On view is a selection of works from the Rilievi and Metacrilati series, representative of the artist's poetic universe.

Roma Arte in Nuvola website

The University of Molise, together with the ARATRO Museum – Galleria Gino Marotta, is promoting a study day dedicated to Gino Marotta, a major figure in contemporary Italian art.

The meeting will offer scholarly and institutional reflections on the bond between the artist and the Molise region, and will also present a restoration project for the large sculpture located in the center of Campobasso.

Article on the study day

Richard Saltoun Gallery presents:

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror…, an exhibition curated by Paola Ugolini, celebrating the work of Gino Marotta, recently featured in the exhibition Panorama Pozzuoli, and Bea Scaccia, among the leading artists of the upcoming 18th Quadriennale d’Arte di Roma.

In the First of the Duino Elegies (1912), the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes: “…For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are barely able to endure, and we admire it so because it serenely disdains to destroy us…”. This inherently “sublime” statement aptly describes the works of Gino Marotta and Bea Scaccia, his former student, which in this intergenerational dialogue unsettle the gaze rather than pacify it.

Dualism, an intrinsic characteristic of the work of art, is the guiding thread that links Marotta’s unnatural methacrylate animals, produced in the 1960s, with Scaccia’s recent painterly and installation-based works.

Gino Marotta was among the first artists to introduce the use of methacrylate (Perspex), an innovative material through which he created artificial landscapes populated by transparent and luminous forms inspired by the animal and plant worlds. Having moved to Rome at a very young age, Marotta had already begun experimenting with lead, tin, aluminium, and Neo-Dada assemblages, moving between painting and sculpture and transforming industrial materials into icons of a collective imagination suspended between nature and artifice. Through his celebrated artificial forests and caravans of imaginary animals, he generated dreamlike environments that simultaneously signal the allure and the fragility of nature.

The caravan of methacrylate animals, seemingly advancing through a dreamlike and surreal atmosphere, cuts vertically through the gallery space which, thanks to the wall drawing created by Scaccia along the entire perimeter of the walls, becomes immersive.

Bea Scaccia has developed an artistic practice that reworks elements of the surface—synthetic furs, jewellery, wigs, fabrics—as painterly signs charged with ambiguity, tools for addressing the darker side of our identity. As the artist states: “My paintings are psychological. They deal with what lies beneath the surface, but they use the devices of surface and façade to speak about our darkness.”

Her research investigates constructions of beauty and their connections with the idea of monstrosity: ambiguous, theatrical, faceless figures become visionary parodies of social conventions, transforming painting into a critical language capable of exposing the tensions between identity and appearance.

The excess of decoration is intentional—an organised chaos from which simulacra of human bodies emerge, bodies that never fully appear yet are always present, like a kind of underlying symphony.

Marotta’s non-human animals serve as an apparently playful warning about the risk of extinction, while Scaccia’s ghostly human animals transport us into a world of queer bodies whose distinctive trait lies in the theatricality of disguise.

Richard Saltoun Gallery website

A city-wide exhibition curated by Chiara Parisi

Five days of contemporary art, archaeology, and landscape transform the city and the Phlegraean Fields into an open-air museum.

Pozzuoli thus becomes the beating heart of an itinerary that is not merely an exhibition, but a collective experience, both secular ritual and spiritual journey. The chosen theme is divinization: the one found in ancient sources, when heroes became gods, but also the one that still permeates the Phlegraean soul today, where the breath of the earth and the sea merges with the imagination of its inhabitants.

Italics.art website

Exhibition video

Acea Heritage is born as an exhibition telling the history and culture of Acea, a journey through works, documents, and objects that shows how Italy’s leading water utility, over its 116 years of activity, has contributed to the country’s economic, social, and civic growth.

The new exhibition space, set up in the former public hall of the historic Piazzale Ostiense headquarters, is part of the Museimpresa network, the Italian association of corporate archives and museums. “Arte, design e architettura a Palazzo” presents works by Gino Marotta, including previously unseen pieces, alongside works by Pietro De Laurentiis, the two artists who created Acea’s monumental sculptures. Across 1,300 square metres, the exhibition includes 70 drawings, sketches, sculptures, and manuscripts. Acea Heritage also houses a physical archive of 31,000 photographs from the company’s historical photographic collection and a library of more than 600 volumes and publications.

The project is not only an exhibition but also a cultural space where visitors can consult the historical archive, attend conferences and training activities, or read. The display also explores the architecture of the building and its monumental fountain, designed by Quaroni, Macri, and Romitelli, together with archival documents, historical photographs, and industrial instruments such as meters, ammeters, voltmeters, and lamps from different periods.

Acea Heritage offers a unique opportunity to reflect on modernity and modular architecture in Rome. Curated by Acea in collaboration with the Gino Marotta Archive and the Pietro De Laurentiis Archive, it provides the city with a new cultural space. From September onward, the venue, already open to employees, will also be accessible to the public by reservation, allowing visitors to discover the technological and social progress of the capital.

As Acea CEO Fabrizio Palermo notes, “Acea Heritage represents the history and culture of Acea and of Italy, telling them through objects, documents, and artworks.” He adds that the company is proud to share a historical heritage that reflects creativity and a commitment to quality. Acea president Barbara Marinali describes the initiative as the reopening of a space returned to the public, dedicated to tradition, culture, and values.

Marinali concludes that the project is a tribute to the passion and dedication of those who helped build the company, while also becoming a springboard toward the future through knowledge of its roots and a stronger corporate identity. The hope is that Acea Heritage will become a point of reference for the community and a symbol of the values that guide the company: innovation, sustainability, and respect for people.

Acea Heritage website

On the occasion of the ninetieth anniversary of Gino Marotta’s birth (Campobasso, 20 June 1935 – Rome, 16 November 2012), the Gino Marotta-ARATRO Gallery, the laboratory museum of contemporary art at the University of Molise, presents the exhibition Gino Marotta. Color as Light, devoted to two major cycles from the artist’s final creative period.

Curated by Lorenzo Canova and Piernicola Maria Di Iorio, the exhibition ideally continues Marotta’s major solo show that inaugurated the ARATRO museum programme in 2007. It opens on Friday, 20 June 2025 at 6:00 p.m. in his native city, on what would have been his ninetieth birthday.

Hosted in the gallery where Marotta served as honorary director and which is now dedicated to him, the exhibition pays tribute to one of the leading Italian artists of the second half of the twentieth century, an untiring pioneer of new visual languages and material experimentation.

Organised in collaboration with the Gino Marotta Archive, the project comes at a particularly positive moment, following the 2023 acquisition of one of his installations for the new contemporary art museum at the Castello di Civitacampomarano through the Ministry of Culture’s Piano per l’Arte Contemporanea, in a project developed together with ARATRO.

Color as Light brings together works made between 2003 and 2010 in two sections: The New Methacrylates, transparent plastic works in which methacrylate becomes a pictorial material able to absorb and reflect space, light, and colour; and Works of Coloured Light, large LED installations, also presented at the 2011 Venice Biennale, where light replaces pigment and the iconographic trace becomes a luminous sign.

The emblematic forms of the artist’s world re-emerge as evocations of a mental landscape in which technology becomes painting and memory.

This double soul, material and immaterial, presents an artist capable of combining nature and artifice, tradition and innovation, restoring to sculpture and painting a scenographic and poetic dimension.

Marotta was a great experimenter with synthetic materials, moving from metals to methacrylates and then to the inclusion of artificial light in sculptural form, in a body of work that constantly investigated the relationship between the natural and the artificial, and between the biological world and its recreation or substitution in the laboratory.

The exhibition at the ARATRO Museum launches a programme of events dedicated to Marotta, including an international seminar and an extensive programme of guided visits and educational activities.

An urban work for the city

To mark the exhibition, a sculpture by Gino Marotta will also be installed in Piazza Pepe, in the heart of Campobasso, at SFUSO by JustMO’, a place where art, design, and urban participation meet.

The work, freely accessible to the public, is intended to create an ideal bridge between the artist’s memory and the local community, returning the enchanted language of his art to the urban landscape.

Press kit for the Marotta ARATRO 2025 exhibition

Exhibition video

On the occasion of MIART 2025, Saltoun Gallery presents a solo display of iconic sculptures by the celebrated Italian artist Gino Marotta in the Portal section.

Marotta is known for his groundbreaking integration of natural and artificial forms in sculpture through industrial materials such as methacrylate. Internationally recognised, he exhibited twice at the Venice Biennale: first with a solo show in 1984 and later, representing Italy in 2011, with Cronotopo virtuale, an immersive environment of coloured light that inspires the gallery’s presentation.

A key figure in the Italian neo-avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s, Marotta reinterpreted natural motifs through a hyper-modern aesthetic that captures the tension between artifice and nature. As he rose to prominence in the 1960s, he moved beyond the then-dominant Informal movement and explored a dynamic synthesis of figuration, visual language, and codes, developing a distinctive style based on industrial materials, especially methacrylate, to create vibrant synthetic landscapes populated by stylised trees, animals, flashes, and abstract celestial forms.

In the Established section, the gallery also presents a group show featuring works by Claudia Di Francesco, Carmen Dionyse, Cleo Fariselli, Bice Lazzari, Gino Marotta, Giuseppe Penone, Bea Scaccia, Greta Schold, Cy Twombly, and Flaminia Veronesi.

Richard Saltoun Gallery website

MIART website

From 20 March to 20 June 2025, Galleria Gracis presents an exhibition dedicated to the Crack Group, a completely unprecedented project with a strong historical and critical focus.

Eight Italian artists with different stylistic orientations joined together briefly, for just one year, in 1960, in the CRACK Group, which represented a conscious break with the recent past and with their contemporaries, taking a polemical stance against the dominant artistic climate.

They were among the leading protagonists of the Roman art scene: Pietro Cascella, Piero Dorazio, Gino Marotta, Fabio Mauri, Gastone Novelli, Achille Perilli, Mimmo Rotella, Giulio Turcato, and the poet and critic Cesare Vivaldi.

The Milan exhibition, curated by Laura Cherubini, with a critical essay by Francesco Guzzetti and scientific support from the archives of the artists involved, recounts this singular artistic experience for the first time.

The group, which brought together artists from different generations and stylistic tendencies, was formed around the shared desire to move beyond both Informal art and the earlier abstraction/realism divide, claiming radical freedom in styles, media, and themes, as well as intellectual independence in the relationship between artwork, visual communication, and reality.

The initiative, and therefore the Crack Group itself, was documented by a single exhibition held at Galleria Il Canale in Venice in August 1960, and above all by the publication of a volume promoted in particular by Mauri and Marotta with Vivaldi, issued by the Krachmalnikoff publishing house headed by Achille Mauri, brother of the artist Fabio.

Galleria Gracis strongly wished to tell the still little-known yet highly fascinating and significant story of the Crack Group, and this Milan exhibition, grounded in a rigorous critical framework and the essential collaboration of the artists’ archives, offers the first opportunity to discover a wide selection of works by the protagonists of the group, including several pieces reproduced in the 1960 catalogue.

The catalogue, published by Manfredi Maretti, includes a reprint of the 1960 catalogue. The volume is organised in monographic sections reproducing each artist’s works and is enriched by colour illustrations of all the exhibited works as well as archival documents related to the history of the Crack Group.

The publication includes critical essays by curator Laura Cherubini and by Francesco Guzzetti, researcher and lecturer at the University of Florence.

Galleria Gracis website

The exhibition marks the eightieth anniversary of the death of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who passed away on 2 December 1944. The project focuses on the relationship between art, science, and technology, a reflection that feels especially timely in a world where the Futurist “prophecy” of the mechanisation of humanity and the humanisation of the machine seems increasingly real. Around 350 works are on display, including paintings, sculptures, projects, drawings, furnishings, films, as well as more than one hundred books and posters.

The exhibition also includes many works from the collection of the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, by major artists of the Futurist period and by contemporary artists inspired by that movement.

Gino Marotta’s Albero artificiale (1965) is displayed in dialogue with Giacomo Balla’s Fiori futuristi.

National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art website

The exhibition investigates the development of Pop Art and the Beat Generation in Italy through a selection of large-scale works alongside documents, music, and original videos.

Starting from the widely shared view that the 1910s and the 1960s were the two defining decades for the arts in Italy,

POP/BEAT – Italy 1960–1979 is conceived as a multidisciplinary project exploring the interconnection among all forms of expression, from painting to sculpture, from video to photography, from music to literature, from social life to fashion, on a scale never before examined in this way.

The exhibition highlights the distinctive strength and originality of Italian Pop Art in Europe, as well as the substantial differences and autonomy of Italian artists compared with their American counterparts. While the latter focused on the consumer products of mass society amplified by advertising, Italian artists also drew on nature, historical and social references, including the political and activist climate around 1968, and looked with interest to Futurism, the first historical avant-garde of the twentieth century.

The Pop section, with nearly one hundred works by thirty-five artists, gives prominence to large formats enhanced by a substantial sculptural section.

Works by Valerio Adami, Franco Angeli, Enrico Baj, Paolo Baratella, Roberto Barni, Gianni Bertini, Alik Cavaliere, Mario Ceroli, Claudio Cintoli, Lucio Del Pezzo, Fernando De Filippi, Bruno Di Bello, Tano Festa, Giosetta Fioroni, Pietro Gallina, Piero Gilardi, Sergio Lombardo, Roberto Malquori, Renato Mambor, Elio Marchegiani, Umberto Mariani, Gino Marotta, Titina Maselli, Fabio Mauri, Mimmo Rotella, Ugo Nespolo, Concetto Pozzati, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Mario Schifano, Emilio Tadini, Cesare Tacchi and others are included.

Catalogue published by Silvana Editoriale.

Basilica Palladiana website

In the prestigious halls of the Palazzo della Cultura in Catania, the exhibition RI EVOLUTION – The Great Revolutionaries of Italian Art, from Futurism to Street Art is presented by Dietro Le Quinte Arte Contemporanea and Emergence Festival, with the patronage of the Sicilian Region, the Department of Culture of the City of Catania, and the scientific and organisational collaboration of Edieuropa QUI Arte Contemporanea.

More than 130 works by 80 Italian artists, among the most important and significant of the twentieth century, trace a thematic and immersive journey through the history of Italian art from the early twentieth century to the present day.

The exhibition revisits the most innovative and revolutionary century of Italian art, offering a multifaceted view of transformations in artistic thought and establishing a continuous dialogue between past and present. Through an innovative display path, visitors move from Futurism to Abstraction, from Arte Povera to Kinetic Art, from Metaphysics to Transavanguardia, and finally to Street Art, through a dialogue among artists united by the originality of their works.

Artists on view include Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Fortunato Depero, Gino Severini, Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Fausto Melotti, Emilio Vedova, Giulio Turcato, Alighiero Boetti, Mario Ceroli, Jannis Kounellis, Gino De Dominicis, Fabio Mauri, Gino Marotta, Pino Pascali, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Franco Angeli, Tano Festa, Mario Schifano, Mimmo Paladino, Maurizio Cattelan, Vettor Pisani, Studio Azzurro, KayOne, Sten Lex, and many others.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by Dietro le Quinte Arte Contemporanea.

RI EVOLUTION website

GINO MAROTTA/EDEN BLU

Curated by Laura Cherubini and Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, with production by Germana Galli and Antonella Muzi, the exhibition is supported by the Regional Council of Abruzzo, Fondazione Carispaq, ANCE L’Aquila, and Farmanatura, under the patronage of the Municipality of L’Aquila.

The project aims to shine a renewed light on Gino Marotta’s work, at a moment when his historical and critical reassessment is gaining fresh momentum. The exhibition brings together a group of iconic blue methacrylate works: trees and animals forming an ideal Eden, an artificial garden in which viewers are immersed and invited to reflect on the worlds of nature and industry, both central to Marotta’s thought.

This highly topical theme reflects on the dialectical relationship between human beings, nature, and artifice in our own time, especially in light of the harmful effects of human action on the environment and the planet as a whole. Through the work of an internationally recognised artist, the exhibition also explores the complexity of the present, foregrounding the powerful intuition Marotta brought to his artistic research as early as the late 1960s.

As curator Giacinto Di Pietrantonio writes in the catalogue, “Wandering through Marotta’s transparent blue jungle gives us a sense of harmony and freedom, as one imagines paradise to be, and as one would wish it to be.”

For Marotta, methacrylate, an innovative material, became a privileged medium; the artist described it as “the only material that does not degenerate, because it is highly technological.” As Laura Cherubini writes, with methacrylate, or Perspex, Marotta found “his” material, while Emilio Villa memorably evoked its “fields of the diaphanous” and “tumults of transparency.”

Transparency, until then largely associated with noble materials such as glass, is transferred here to a new artificial substance: methacrylate also becomes, almost by necessity, a generator of light.

As Gino Marotta said, “I used light-colour instead of material-colour.”

Born in Molise (Campobasso, 1935 – Rome, 2012), Marotta also maintained a long and productive relationship with Abruzzo, where in the 1970s he directed the Academy of Fine Arts in L’Aquila, whose faculty included figures such as Alberto Arbasino, Sylvano Bussotti, Carmelo Bene, and Fabio Mauri.

Over the years, Gino Marotta developed a deep investigation into materials, working from the 1950s onward with industrial products before identifying his chosen medium: methacrylate. As a precursor of themes that remain strikingly relevant today, he worked on the iconography of nature, opening an inquiry into the relationship between nature and artifice.

Fondazione Carispaq website

Exhibition video

For the first time, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is dedicating a major exhibition to the history of plastic in the visual arts, opening up a broad panorama of the artistic use and transformation of this material from the 1960s to the present day.

As curator Martina Weinhart writes, “Plastic is the emblematic material of our present, one that radically changed art and society in a very short time. What has now revealed itself as an enormous environmental burden once represented a great enrichment for art, architecture, and design.”

Plastic is everywhere. It permeates the present and is omnipresent in everyday life. Synthetic materials quickly found their way into art thanks to their immense creative possibilities, rapidly becoming a fundamental medium and a vehicle of innovation.

Plastic World brings together 100 works by more than 50 international artists working with plastics in a wide variety of ways, including Monira Al Qadiri, Archigram, Arman, Cesar, Christo, Haus-Rucker-Co, Eva Hesse, Hans Hollein, Craig Kauffman, Kiki Kogelnik, Gino Marotta, James Rosenquist, Pascale Marthine Tayou, and Pinar Yoldas.

In the words of Sebastian Baden, director of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, “With Plastic World, the Schirn presents a unique and long-awaited overview of the use of synthetic materials in the visual arts. Our exhibition goes far beyond purely aesthetic and formal aspects, inviting instead a critical examination of the use of this material.”

With the rapid spread of industrial materials in the second half of the 1960s, artists such as Gino Marotta explored the relationship between nature and artificiality, challenging traditional concepts of mimetic representation. Marotta is represented in the exhibition by the installation Eden Artificiale (1967–1973), a modular non-nature in polymethyl methacrylate.

Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt website

The work

Artificial Giraffe, three metres high and made of transparent pink polymethyl methacrylate, belongs to the series of methacrylate sculptures that Gino Marotta created from the early 1960s through the early 1970s. Owned by the Museo del Novecento, the work was donated by the artist to the Municipality of Milan in 1973, on the occasion of his solo exhibition at the Rotonda della Besana.

Through his innovative and pioneering experimentation with transparent plastic, Marotta explored the concepts of the “artificial” and the “natural,” describing the natural world through an artificial material such as polymethyl methacrylate and placing the relationship with industrial production at the centre of his work.

Marotta’s research on animal sculptures in methacrylate, of which the 1973 Artificial Giraffe is the largest example, opened in the 1960s and 1970s onto an environmental and installation-based dimension: from single objects, the sculptures came together to form imaginary landscapes into which the viewer is invited to enter and immerse themselves, and they also became stage sets for theatre and cinema, as shown by Marotta’s artistic collaboration with Carmelo Bene.

The restoration project

Since 2016, the Getty Conservation Institute, through project coordinator Anna Lagana (GCI), has been collaborating with the Museo del Novecento in Milan, which made Artificial Giraffe available as a case study.

The project focuses on the conservation of plastic materials, in particular transparent polymethyl methacrylate, a medium used by many contemporary artists. Conserving this material poses numerous challenges, including restoring transparency and identifying restoration materials that do not compromise its integrity.

The Getty Conservation Institute, Museo del Novecento, CCR, and MUDEC are working together to apply GCI research on the conservation of plastic materials and to disseminate methodologies for preserving contemporary works. Activities include open days at the MUDEC restoration laboratory and a series of training workshops for professionals on the conservation of plastics.

The work is being restored in MUDEC’s restoration laboratory by Anna Lagana (GCI), who is responsible for the restoration, together with Marco Demmelbauer (CCR).

At the end of the restoration, in late April, the work will be exhibited at the Museo di Storia Naturale in Milan as part of the “Rainbow” programme, with free admission for the public.

Workshop for conservators

On 17 and 31 March and 14 April, the workshop “The Conservation of Plastic. A Case Study: Gino Marotta’s Artificial Giraffe” will take place at the MUDEC restoration laboratory and Spazio delle Culture in Milan, led by Anna Lagana (Getty Conservation Institute) and Marco Demmelbauer (Centro Conservazione e Restauro La Venaria Reale).

The workshop was developed in collaboration with the “Storie di Plastica” project, which involves a number of institutions including CESMAR7, the Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci in Milan, CASVA, ISPC-CNR, and the University of Turin Department of Chemistry.

Photo by Rossella Papetti

MUDEC website

Municipality of Milan website

Catalogue texts by Benedetta Carpi De Resmini and Ludovico Pratesi. Artists on view include Carla Accardi, Vincenzo Agnetti, Mirella Bentivoglio, Tommaso Binga, Alighiero Boetti, Jannis Kounellis, Gino Marotta, and Simona Weller.

Galleria Erica Ravenna continues its exhibition programme with a reflection on the intersections between language and image and on the poetics that have brought together a line of contemporary artistic research born with the early twentieth-century avant-gardes and developed up to the present day.

In this group exhibition, titled FARE UNO. From Word to Sign, a Possible Dialogue, a selection of works by Carla Accardi, Tommaso Binga, Mirella Bentivoglio, Simona Weller, Vincenzo Agnetti, Alighiero Boetti, Jannis Kounellis, and Gino Marotta highlights a shared sensibility within the artistic research of the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, in a moment of renewed attention to women artists, it raises the question of a dialogue between the “two halves of the avant-garde.”

The reference to the Lacanian notion of the “(im)possibility of making ONE” guides this reflection through a polyphonic dialogue in which the WORD becomes the protagonist as the foundation of the image, “in which being will recognise itself and through which it will recognise others.”

Erica Ravenna Gallery website

Sixteen artists are featured in the exhibition: Paolo Albertelli and Mariagrazia Abbaldo, Maura Banfo, Nazareno Biondo, Nicola Bolla, Stefano Bombardieri, Jessica Carroll, Fabrizio Corneli, Cracking Art, Diego Dutto, Ezio Gribaudo, Michele Guaschino, Luigi Mainolfi, Gino Marotta, Mario Merz, Pino Pascali, and Velasco Vitali.

As curators Stefania Dassi and Carla Testore explain, the choice of animals stems from research that highlights multiple interpretive keys. Throughout the history of art and across the development of civilisations, certain animals have long been chosen and represented for their strong symbolic value.

The installation, set within the historic royal residence, transforms the museum into a place of wonder and knowledge, where visitors are invited to move through works by artists of our time and the recent past.

The exhibition, which includes more than 25 installations, unfolds in part within the Royal Gardens, a defining element of the Musei Reali and a precious meeting place for both residents and visitors. Viewers can admire the sculptures while moving through a silent, motionless zoo. The display also extends through the rooms of the Royal Palace, the Armoury, and the Galleria Sabauda, where the public can discover unexpected connections between contemporary sculptures and the animals depicted in the historical collections.

In the Breakfast Room of the Royal Palace, Gino Marotta’s installation Oasi artificiale is on view, including the 1969 sculptures Albero artificiale, Fenicottero artificiale, and Miraggio di menta.

Musei Reali Torino website

Lorenzo Canova, Laura Cherubini, Isa Francavilla Marotta, Nicola Spezzano, and Andrea Viliani, members of the committee, speak with the aim of shedding light on the common thread running through the different phases of Gino Marotta’s artistic creation.

The Archive aims to become a centre for study and research capable of promoting and enhancing the overall image of Marotta, his artistic production, and his conception of art.

The other members of the Technical and Scientific Committee are also present: Giorgia Calo, Carlo Francavilla, Manfredi Maretti, and Angelandreina Rorro.

Erica Ravenna Gallery website

Curated by Renata Cristina Mazzantini

The Gino Marotta Archive takes part in this third edition of Quirinale Contemporaneo with works by Gino Marotta: Albero artificiale, 1966, in methacrylate, displayed in the Imperial Chamber of the Palazzo del Quirinale, and Rupestre, 2002, ceramic sculptures displayed at the Castelporziano estate.

As President Sergio Mattarella stated when presenting the initiative, this is “a project intended to renew the image of institutional spaces through the inclusion of significant expressions of the genius and imagination of Italian artists, from the birth of the Republic to the present day: works of art and objects of design that add an important public testimony to Italian excellence in this field.”

As Renata Cristina Mazzantini writes in the project and catalogue, published by Treccani with photographs by Massimo Listri, “The Quirinale is a place of values and memory, of art and beauty, and its extraordinary heritage bears the signature of the finest artists who, through the succession of thirty pontiffs and four rulers, enriched over time the work of their predecessors.”

She continues by noting that contemporary art has reached the Hill to document the Republican era as well, showing that Italy does not live only in the afterglow of its magnificent tradition, but remains, today as yesterday, an extraordinary forge of creativity.

The selection was guided by the decision to turn directly to the artists themselves, or to the foundations and archives representing them.

In the state rooms of the Quirinale, ceramics by Cerone and Leoncillo, bronzes by Marini, works by Fabro and Melotti, and Merz’s raw earth are distributed across marble consoles, while the imposing sculptures of Ceroli and de Chirico stand out alongside the more slender sculptures of Marotta and Nunzio, and Fontana’s delicate “butterfly.”

In the park of Castelporziano, large ceramic works by Marotta and Caruso are on display.

The curatorial choice, Mazzantini explains, was guided by the idea of innovating within tradition, following the saying attributed to Gustav Mahler: “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”

Quirinale website

Dialogues: Pino Pascali / Gino Marotta. Natural Artifices, curated by Rosalba Brana and Lorenzo Canova, brings together two protagonists of the renewal of Italian and international art in the 1960s.

Born in the same year, 1935, the two artists were linked by friendship as well as by poetic and visual affinities. Both active within the vibrant Roman neo-avant-garde scene, Pascali and Marotta were central figures in those artistic researches that, starting from the use of new materials from the contemporary world, gave rise to a new idea of the work of art and its relationship with the viewer through the immersive crossing of environmental art.

Their shared interests included new industrial materials and, in counterpoint, a continuous return to nature, as well as crossovers with set design, advertising, television, and cinema, fields in which both artists were active.

As Rosalba Brana writes in the catalogue, “Pino Pascali (1935–1968) and Gino Marotta (1935–2012) fully inhabited the artistic climate of the 1960s and contributed to substantial changes in expressive and linguistic terms, both children of a new culture in which the impulses of agrarian culture and the growing industrial civilisation converged. The exhibition creates a visual dialogue that highlights the similarities and differences within which the artists operated, giving space to a form of creative freedom beyond convention.”

The two artists followed related paths and both appeared in landmark exhibitions such as Lo Spazio dell’Immagine in Foligno (1967) and 4 artistes italiens plus que nature in Paris in 1969, where Pascali was present alongside Marotta, Mario Ceroli, and Jannis Kounellis, despite having tragically died the year before.

As Lorenzo Canova explains, “Pascali and Marotta are two protagonists of Italian and international art of the 1960s, two young men linked by friendship, by being born in the same year, and by coming from two southern cities in neighbouring regions, two experimenters in new languages and new forms of expression, innovators capable of fruitfully extending their work into fields such as advertising, architecture, theatre, and television while maintaining the distinctive features of their own vision.”

The encounter in the spaces of the Pascali Foundation unfolds through a route organised into several sections, narrating the relationship between modular tension, fiction, experimentation, and landscape through works such as Albero del Paradiso, Oasi d’Ombra, Natura Modulare, and Paesaggio Artificiale, among others dating from 1964 to 1973. Pascali’s Cinque Bachi da setola and cocoon enter into dialogue with Marotta’s neon-lit Ninfee in orange, acid green, and black, in a rich interplay of nature, invention, and artificiality.

With this exhibition, the Fondazione Pino Pascali continues its historical and critical research programme, placing Pascali’s work in dialogue with that of other masters, not necessarily contemporaries, through a play of correspondences, poetic visions, and shared impulses. Previous exhibitions in this Dialogues cycle included Pino Pascali e Luigi Ghirri, Pascali Bonalumi Castellani Fontana Manzoni, and Pino Pascali e Claudio Cintoli.

The exhibition opened on Friday 2 July at 6:30 pm and remained on view in accordance with the anti-Covid regulations in force.

Fondazione Pino Pascali website

Exhibition video

Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea and the CRRI (Centro di Ricerca Castello di Rivoli) present A.B.O. THEATRON. Art or Life, an exhibition exploring the figure of one of the most important contemporary art historians, critics, and curators, Achille Bonito Oliva.

The exhibition was developed by Andrea Viliani, head and curator of the CRRI, based on a concept by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Achille Bonito Oliva, with a scientific committee comprising Marcella Beccaria, chief curator and curator of the museum’s collections, together with Cecilia Casorati, Laura Cherubini, Stefano Chiodi, and Paola Marino, art historians and curators who have long followed Bonito Oliva’s critical, essayistic, and exhibition activity.

On the occasion of the exhibition, Achille Bonito Oliva donated his personal archive to the CRRI.

Andrea Viliani remarked: “It has been a continuous discovery and a great privilege to devote these two years to the study of a still unpublished archive that reconstructs more than sixty years of Achille Bonito Oliva’s critical and exhibition activity. Our exhibition is a milestone in Castello di Rivoli’s programme, and in that of its CRRI, dedicated to the greatest curators of the twentieth century.”

Art or Life unfolds across three interconnected levels, each corresponding to an important aspect of Bonito Oliva’s multifaceted work: the curatorship of exhibitions, through reconstructions of major thematic shows selected by the curator himself; his encyclopaedic essay writing and private sphere, represented by key publications and extensive unpublished material; and his performative expression in public space, including work for radio, cinema, television, magazines, honours, and the devices through which he built a distinct public persona.

A bilingual scientific catalogue published by Castello di Rivoli and Skira accompanies the exhibition, introduced by an essay by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and an interview between Achille Bonito Oliva and Hans Ulrich Obrist. The volume also includes unpublished essays by Marcella Beccaria, Andrea Viliani, Cecilia Casorati, Laura Cherubini, Clarissa Ricci, Stefano Chiodi, Andrea Cortellessa, Carlo Falciani, and Paola Marino, together with entries on Bonito Oliva’s principal exhibitions and an extensive bio-bibliography and annotated chronology.

Castello di Rivoli website

Catalogue texts by Fabio Benzi and Laura Cherubini.

The gallery reopens with the exhibition Man and Art.

Once again, the exhibition underlines the importance of the relationship with history as a foundational element of the various languages of visual art.

A selection of works by Jannis Kounellis, Gino Marotta, Mario Schifano, and Giulio Paolini, in which the reference to both distant and more recent art history is openly declared, is presented in an original comparison with their direct and original sources of inspiration: Lucas Cranach the Elder, Giorgio de Chirico, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.

This polyphonic dialogue reveals the history of images and questions the collective representations that intersect the memory and culture of a people. From the classical world to the early twentieth century, the exhibition presents the fruits of a research into what the iconologist Aby Warburg would have called the eternal “survival of antiquity.”

The 1960s opened a creative season that, in art historiography, traditionally marks a decisive break with earlier canons.

A new and multifaceted grammar was taking shape, seemingly determined to sever ties with the past and definitively reject retrospective attitudes. Yet in a country such as Italy, where artistic heritage is intrinsically part of national identity, even Marinetti’s call to destroy museums, libraries, and academies could only retain a programmatic value for later generations.

The works on display show how Italian artists of that generation, even while adhering to a specific cultural climate, frequently drew from the repertoire of ancient and later art history, retrieving formal motifs and intentions, reworking or directly citing iconographies, and demonstrating that the past can never be said to be wholly concluded within the present.

This exhibition speaks precisely about that relationship, about the value it has had in Italy and Europe in shaping a cultural identity proper to the Western world, and about how it can still be traced even in the latest experiments of new artistic languages.

Erica Ravenna Gallery website

The Fondazione Donnaregina per le Arti Contemporanee presents the first retrospective exhibition dedicated to Marcello Rumma (Salerno, 1942–1970), a central figure in Italian and international cultural debate between the 1960s and 1970s.

During his six years of activity, from 1965 to 1970, Rumma developed a brief yet intense and pioneering path as a promoter of exhibition and editorial projects, a cultural entrepreneur, and a collector, organising exhibitions and publications devoted to the latest generations and the most experimental artistic research of his time. These projects are recognised as key experiences in the history of contemporary art and culture.

Among the projects promoted by Marcello Rumma were the three editions of the Amalfi International Art Review.

The first edition, Aspetti del “ritorno alle cose stesse”, curated by Renato Barilli in 1966, analysed contemporary painting in Italy.

The second edition, L’impatto percettivo, curated by Alberto Boatto and Filiberto Menna in 1967, explored the theme of perception in contemporary artistic research.

The third and final edition, Arte Povera piu Azioni Povere, curated by Germano Celant in 1968, marked the substantial affirmation of Arte Povera research at a formative moment and its first presentation in a public space. The exhibition included works by Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Mario and Marisa Merz, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Gianni Piacentino, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Gilberto Zorio, alongside actions extending beyond the exhibition space into the city and landscape by Riccardo Camoni, Paolo Icaro, Pietro Lista, Gino Marotta, Plinio Martelli, Carmine Limatola known as Ableo, Annemarie Sauzeau Boetti, and Pistoletto’s Zoo, with the participation, at Piero Gilardi’s invitation, of three foreign artists: Jan Dibbets, Richard Long, and Ger van Elk.

This exhibition is not intended as a commemoration or a celebration; rather, it aims to rethink critically the effects of those experiences and to make the complexity of that project resonate again, reinvesting it in an action capable of opening new scenarios of research, narration, and renewed experience.

MADRE Museum website

The exhibition is structured in several chapters which, through painting, photography, video, film, and installations, lead viewers to immerse themselves in the feelings and reflections that landscape has inspired in artists and photographers, and to appreciate works that are not only compelling images but also documents in which the culture of an entire era is poured.

Landscape painting is in fact the result of a highly complex process of interpretation and “reconstruction” of nature, one that involves the historical context and its system of relationships, the artistic culture to which the author belongs, and the artist’s individual history.

Through a long narrative built from painting, sculpture, decorative arts, photography, and new media, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, the exhibition revolves around the creative thought of landscape.

From the 1960s onward, landscape often became an internalised reference to deeply individual experience; yet it was also within Pop Art and emerging conceptual research that landscape regained full legitimacy in artists committed to making the theme a place of encounter between painting, new expressive media, and new industrial materials in the effort to create new languages and a total objectification of the image.

Works on view include those by Giovanni Fattori, Giovanni Boldini, Giacomo Balla, Fortunato Depero, Giulio Aristide Sartorio, Duilio Cambellotti, Antonio Donghi, Ottone Rosai, Giorgio Morandi, Mario Mafai, Afro Basaldella, Carlo Levi, Fausto Pirandello, Tancredi, Giulio Turcato, Gino Marotta, Mario Giacomelli, Mario Schifano, Luigi Ghirri, Gabriele Basilico, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and others.

Palazzo Pretorio di Pontedera website

A project dedicated to a fundamental line of Italian art in the second half of the twentieth century, bringing together the major protagonists of a special historical moment and an interweaving of visions and expressive forms that left an essential legacy to younger generations: Superpop 20/21 presents the vitality of research carried out by authors linked to the context of Pop Art.

The exhibition path begins with a pioneer such as Mimmo Rotella, precursor of the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo and the Roman Pop scene, shown here alongside Franco Angeli, Umberto Bignardi, Marisa Busanel, Mario Ceroli, Claudio Cintoli, Tano Festa, Giosetta Fioroni, Sergio Lombardo, Renato Mambor, Bruno Mancinotti, Gino Marotta, Titina Maselli, Pino Pascali, Luca Maria Patella, Mario Schifano, and Cesare Tacchi.

Alongside them are protagonists from Milan, such as Valerio Adami, Enrico Baj, Paolo Baratella, Lucio Del Pezzo, and Emilio Tadini, as well as figures from Turin, Bologna, and Florence such as Piero Gilardi, Ugo Nespolo, Concetto Pozzati, Gianni Bertini, Umberto Buscioni, and Gianni Ruffi, showing the freshness and breadth of these artistic researches, extending even to the visual poetry of Nanni Balestrini.

Palazzo d'Avalos Museum website

About sixty works are on display, selected from the more than 400 pieces in the Premio Termoli Collection and dating from 1955 to the present day. Most are paintings on canvas, but the exhibition also includes sculptures made using a wide range of techniques and materials, chosen by Laura Cherubini and Arianna Rosica for the seven exhibition rooms of MACTE. In the museum’s central space, the curators pay tribute to Mario Ceroli and Gino Marotta, two major artists who took part in the Premio Termoli.

Fondazione MACTE website

The exhibition Giorgio De Chirico. Return to the Future. Neometaphysics and Contemporary Art at GAM in Turin proposes a dialogue between Giorgio de Chirico’s neometaphysical painting and the generations of artists who, especially from the 1960s onward, were influenced by his work, recognising him as the master who inspired their new vision and who, through his neometaphysics, entered into direct dialogue with younger generations.

The exhibition connects De Chirico’s works with tendencies in Italian and international art, including the Pop Art of Andy Warhol, Valerio Adami, Franco Angeli, Mario Ceroli, Lucio Del Pezzo, Tano Festa, Giosetta Fioroni, Ezio Gribaudo, Gino Marotta, Ugo Nespolo, Concetto Pozzati, Mimmo Rotella, Mario Schifano, Emilio Tadini, and others.

GAM Torino website

Light and Movement. The Experimental Cinema of Marinella Pirelli, produced by Comune di Milano Cultura with Electa and curated by Lucia Aspesi and Iolanda Ratti, presents works from Pirelli’s activity in experimental cinema, focusing on the period between 1961 and 1974, the year of her last work.

At the centre of the exhibition route is Film Ambiente, a walk-through cinematic structure created, patented, and presented at Galleria De Nieubourg in 1969.

Tommaso Trini describes Film Ambiente in the catalogue as follows: “The subject of the film is the elementary symbols enclosed in the parallelepiped sculptures of Gino Marotta’s Nuovo Paradiso; the idea of the environment initially took shape from the spatiality of the Roman sculptor’s work. In the De Nieubourg experiment, the sound design was entrusted to Livio Castiglioni.”

Other films in the exhibition inspired by Gino Marotta’s sculptures include Nuovo Paradiso, 1969 (film, 16 mm, 7’50’’), inspired by the series of sculptures of the same title shown at Galleria De Nieubourg.

Naturale-Artificiale, 1968–69 (film, 16 mm, 15’30’’), is based on Marotta’s exhibition of the same name held at Galleria dell’Ariete in Milan in 1968.

Luce movimento, 1967 (film, 16 mm, 10’30’’), presents abstract and geometric forms based on the works shown in the exhibition Luce e movimento in Europa at Galleria dell’Ariete in Milan in 1967. The film records with great precision the installations of Gianni Colombo, Bruno Munari, Gino Marotta, Lucio Fontana, and Grazia Varisco.

Museo del Novecento website

Gino Marotta (Campobasso, 1935 – Rome, 2012) is one of the protagonists of the Italian and international art scene of the 1960s, introducing an innovative vision of art through the use of new chemical and industrial materials, above all methacrylate, which he transformed poetically into lyrical universes.

Through this medium, the artist explored what most deeply characterises his poetics: the dualism between nature and artifice, light and transparency, work and environment, leading him to recreate imaginary scenarios populated by transparent figures drawn from the natural world yet explicitly artificial and emptied of bodily consistency.

Galleria Erica Ravenna Fiorentini pays tribute to Gino Marotta with a solo exhibition retracing the most significant stages of his artistic journey, from the iron sheets to the methacrylate sculptures that express his investigation into modernity.

As the artist himself stated, the combined use of methacrylate and artificial light lays bare the mechanism of thought. Through methacrylate, the immateriality of light itself becomes matter. A fundamental characteristic of his work is its ability to show the inner procedures of construction: another sign of the artist’s belonging to the great cultural line of modernity.

Conversation on Gino Marotta

On Monday 3 December 2018 at 6:30 pm, Galleria Erica Ravenna Fiorentini, Via Margutta 17, Rome, hosted a conversation on Gino Marotta on the occasion of the exhibition The Fabulous World of Gino Marotta.

Participants included Lorenzo Canova, Laura Cherubini, Maria Vittoria Marini Clarelli, Isa Francavilla Marotta, Daniele Cordero di Montezemolo, and Piero Sartogo.

Catalogue presentation

On Wednesday 6 February 2019 at 6:30 pm, the gallery presented the catalogue of the exhibition The Fabulous World of Gino Marotta, curated by Laura Cherubini and Erica Ravenna, with a text by Laura Cherubini.

Speakers included Laura Cherubini, Ludovico Pratesi, and Angelandreina Rorro.

Erica Ravenna Gallery website

On the occasion of the Giornata del Contemporaneo promoted by AMACI and the fiftieth anniversary of the exhibition arte povera piu azioni povere (Antichi Arsenali della Repubblica, Amalfi, 4–6 October 1968), Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea dedicated a documentary exhibition to this fundamental moment in postwar art.

Arte povera piu azioni povere was organised in 1968 by the Centro Studi Colautti in Salerno, promoted by Marcello Rumma, the enlightened collector, publisher, and patron, and curated by Germano Celant.

The exhibition represented the first major moment of internationalisation for artists of the 1960s, bringing together protagonists of conceptual art, post-minimalism, and Land Art, and anticipating landmark exhibitions such as When Attitudes Become Form (Kunsthalle Bern and Institute of Contemporary Art, London, 1969), Op Losse Schroeven: Situaties and Cryptostructuren (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1969), and Documenta 5 (Kassel, 1972).

The Amalfi exhibition can be considered the first Arte Povera show held in a public space. Participants included Ableo, Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Jan Dibbets, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Paolo Icaro, Pietro Lista, Richard Long, Gino Marotta, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Gianni Piacentino, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini, Ger van Elk, and Gilberto Zorio.

Castello di Rivoli website

100%ITALIA is an exhibition dedicated to the last hundred years of Italian art, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day. Through a comprehensive historical route, the project offers an opportunity to highlight the prominent role of Italian art, which has profoundly shaped both European and global creativity. Artists regarded as cornerstones of international culture are represented through one or more works that exemplify their trajectory and historical moment, allowing visitors to undertake an extraordinary journey across a century of art.

From Lorenzo Canova’s catalogue text: Italian Pop found one of its natural centres of diffusion in Rome, the city of mass media, cinema, radio, and television, where what came to be known as the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo emerged. Beginning with the work of Mimmo Rotella, it included many protagonists such as Franco Angeli, Mario Schifano, Tano Festa, Sergio Lombardo, Renato Mambor, Cesare Tacchi, Mario Ceroli, Gino Marotta, Giosetta Fioroni, Claudio Cintoli, Luca Patella, and Umberto Bignardi, in a context that also included artists such as Marisa Busanel, Laura Grisi, and Titina Maselli.

Museo Ettore Fico website