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ART IN ITALY IN THE POSTWAR PERIOD 
BETWEEN CONCRETISM AND NEW ABSTRACTIONISM
Works from the collection of Civica Galleria di Arte Moderna di Gallarate

From October 21, 2001 through February 17, 2002
Opening hours: Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays: 10-12 am / 3.00 - 6.00 pm
All the other days of the week: only by appointment
Admittance fee: lire 5000  - cut-rate tickets: 3000

Inauguration: Saturday, October 20 at 6.00 pm

Press release

After the successful exhibit "Astrattismo storico italiano: il caso Como," Civico Museo Parisi-Valle in Maccagno (on the Lake Maggiore, a few kilometers from Luino), focuses now on the evolution of abstractionism, concentrating at first on one of the aspects of this evolution - the one that is the result of geometrical or concrete abstractionism - and then moving on to explore all the other aspects of this movement that developed during the 70s, the 80s, and the 90s.
Civica Galleria di Arte Moderna of Gallarate has a vast collection of works (over 3100) that it started to collect when the  "Premio Nazionale Arti Visive" award was created in 1950, and was therefore chosen as a source of material and information for this exhibit.
Thanks to director Emma Zanella Manara and the management committee of the gallery, the Parisi- Valle museum was able to select a good number of representative works, starting from such masters as Soldati, Reggiani, Radice, Vedova, Fontana, and moving then to new artists to represent each period, thus covering the last 50 years of the twentieth century.
Main source of inspiration and material for this exhibit – which focuses solely on Italian artists - is Arte astratta e concreta, an exhibition that was held in Milan in 1947, which summarized the European artistic experiences of the previous decades and had as core works by most of the masters who further developed the researches made during the 30s and 40s. Max Bill, the person behind the exhibit, said, ”Concrete art makes abstract thoughts visible, using purely artistic means and thus creating new objects.”   Following this concept, the M.A.C. (Movimento Arte Concreta – Concrete Art Movement) pushes the limits even further, refusing to submit to the rigid rules of Swiss concretism and making room for artists coming from various artistic venues.

This “concreteness” transpires very clearly from the works both by the founders of M.A.C. (Dorfles, Monnet, Munari, Soldati) and those by the other artists that joined this current and kept on developing this artistic concept (Nativi, Mazzon, Garau, Pantaleoni, Parisot, Chevrier).  From a similar philosophy also originates the work dated 1949 by Emilio Vedova, which well represents him. While such artists as Fontana, Veronesi, Carmi, and Salardi give abstractionism a new meaning, new concepts emerge from the new generations in the 70’s. Works by Verna, Ortelli, Pomodoro, Frattini, and Piemonti are worth mentioning, and so are those created in the 80’s by Mazzoleni, Minoli, Falchi, Pardi, Xerra, and then Aricò, Iacchetti, Griffa, Olivieri, Tirelli, Peroli, Nunzio, Desì, Asdrubali, De Lorenzo, Reale Frangi.  Similar concepts can be found in the sculptures made by Tavernari, Ramous, Cappello, Morandini, Grosso and P. Martini.
The kind of informal abstractionism that has to do with graphic signs and matter has always eclipsed another type of creative research that relies more on the mechanisms of the mind than on physical energy. This exhibit finally gives this research the attention it deserves.

“L’astrazione concreta in Italia nel dopoguerra” has been organized by Luigi Cavadini, and perfectly fits into the artistic path followed by Civico Museo Parisi-Valle, built around the donation by G. Vittorio Parisi to the museum - a collection mainly made of Concrete Art works both by Parisi himself and by other important artists who were active during a fundamental period for the innovation and development of international visual culture.
A catalog of the exhibit is available, with an introduction written by Luigi Cavadini and Emma Zanella Manara – director of Civica Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Gallarate (Public Modern Art Gallery of Gallarate).
The exhibition will be inaugurated on Saturday, October 20, 2001 at 6.00 pm, and will be open through February 17 on Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays from 10.00 am to 12.00 am and from 3.00 pm to 6.00 pm.
Civico Museo Parisi-Valle is a modern art museum in Maccagno (VA) and opened in 1998. This building made of reinforced concrete crosses the Giona River like a bridge where the river flows into Lake Maggiore, and was designed by Roman architect Maurizio Sacripanti (1916-1996), engineer Giuseppe Noris (1924-1989), architect Riccardo Colella, and by Giuseppe Vittorio Parisi, expert in visual culture and founder of the museum. The museum has grown from a vast number of two-dimensional, three-dimensional, and graphic works realized by G. Vittorio Parisi between the 30’s and the 90’s and donated by the artist himself along with many works by other important artists – who were also his friends – all of them very active during years that would turn out to be fundamental for the development and innovation of international visual culture.

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