The summer exhibition at Palazzo Ricci opened to the public on July 12th “Everyday Universes“, promoted by the Carima Foundation with the patronage of the Municipality of Macerata and curated by the museum’s artistic director Roberto Cresti. The exhibition can be visited until September 29, 2024.
The title of the exhibition event states the theme that is being investigated, that is, everyday life. A theme that may seem common at first glance, but which in reality reveals the vast and complex interior dimension of the artists who have interpreted it: Giorgio Morandi,
Gianfranco Ferroni And Luciano DeVitawith the exceptional presence of Francisco Goya.
The Professor Cresti he in fact explained how: «Everyday life is the main test of our existence. European culture of the 19th and 20th centuries made it an interpretative category of the human being: a mirror of infinite dimensions in which the faces of the romantics, the realists, the great “accursed”, the existentialists up to the minimalists who closed the long cultural history of the twentieth century were reflected. The artists of the visible have accentuated this orientation and have discovered in everyday life a base from which to start and to which to return for their expressive periples».
Giorgio Morandi, whose death marks the sixtieth anniversary this year, occupies a position of absolute pre-eminence in twentieth-century art in Italy and around the world. Present in the Palazzo Ricci collection with two valuable paintings, “Vaso di rose” from 1947 and “Natura morta” from 1962, in the context of the exhibition he is valued mainly as an engraver. He was in fact the holder of the chair of engraving at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna from 1930 to 1956.
Gianfranco Ferroni is among the most representative names in the artistic panorama of the last decades of the twentieth century. The filter of biography is evident in all the phases of his long work, which saw him confront painting, engraving and photography.ia. Ferronian art has a historical character with respect to the period in which he lived, that of the post-war period first and of the economic boom afterwards, which he often recounts in times of poverty, degradation and marginality. His works are “everyday icons” and his pain is a “secular religion” that questions the objects and places of everyday life in a process of approaching the meaning of human existence.
Luciano De Vita, born in the Marche region and adopted by Bologna, had Morandi himself as his engraving teacher, of whom he was the favourite pupil, assistant and successor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. Like Ferroni, he was indelibly marked by the cruelty of war events, which involved him personally and therefore permeated his artistic production. An unspeakable experience that he poured into his works, taking as a reference model the “delirious expressiveness” of Francisco Goya, of whom some unpublished engravings are presented. The presence of the Spanish artist indicates a path that, from the last two centuries, reaches up to the present day and that we find in the works selected by the curator.
“The exhibition path – concluded President Francesco Sabatucci Frisciotti Stendardi – offers about sixty pieces including paintings, etchings and photographs by artists of absolute quality and great expressive depth, some of which are exhibited to the public for the first time. The exhibition is therefore distinguished by this important element of novelty, which will allow visitors to enjoy works that are completely new to the Macerata area, which integrate with the twentieth century of Palazzo Ricci”.
“Universi quotidiano” will be open to visitors for free until September 29, 2024.
Giorgio Morandi
Born into a lower middle class family in Bologna on 20 July 1890, Giorgio Morandi studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in the Emilian capital, graduating in 1913. In search of a style devoid of any academicism, influenced by an initial acquaintance with the work of Paul Cézanne and Henri Rousseau, the Doganiere, together with his fellow students Osvaldo Licini, Severo Pozzati, Mario Bacchelli and othersre, with the Italian Futurist avant-garde, exhibiting in group shows in Bologna and Rome. During the First World War, thanks to his discharge from the army due to a serious lung disease, he developed a style of painting deriving from the Metaphysics of Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà, who would bring him, in the immediate post-war period, to the attention of Mario Broglio, founder of the Roman magazine, but of international scope, «Valori Plastici». With the group formed around the magazine, he exhibited in the 1920s in Italy and Germany and then matured an adhesion to the Novecento Italiano of Margherita Sarfatti, also participating in the Venice Biennale and the Rome Quadriennale. Soon recognized, as well as a painter, as a master of engraving technique, he held the chair of this teaching from 1930 to 1956 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. He stayed for long periods, including the years of the Second World War, in the Apennine village of Grizzana (now Grizzana-Morandi), of which he painted and engraved many landscapes. After 1945 his fame grew further, reaching an international extension, with exhibitions in Europe and South America. He died on 18 June 1964 in the house in Bologna at via Fondazza 36, where he had spent his life with his three sisters and produced much of his work.
Gianfranco Ferroni
Gianfranco Ferroni was born in Livorno on 22 February 1927 to a family that suffered a heavy economic setback following the Second World War (his father, an engineer, was left without a job). The war events led the Ferronis to take refuge in Lombardy, in the province of Varese, in an environment from which the future painter wanted to free himself, in the first post-war period, leaving his parents and moving to Milan to indulge his artistic vocation. He trained as a self-taught artist in the Milanese environment and established himself, at the end of the 1950s, in the context of the so-called “existential realism” (G. Banchieri, G. Cazzaniga, M. Cerretti, G. Guerreschi, G. Romagnoni, T. Vaglieri). He exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1958, finding, during the 1960s – in which he also took part in the group Il pro e il contro (U. Attardi, E. Calabria, F. Farulli, G. Ferroni, A. Gianquinto, P. Guccione, G. Guerreschi, G. Romagnoni, R. Vespignani) – a correspondence between his work and the antagonistic political movements of Italian society that developed with the economic boom. He lived mainly in Lombardy, between Milan and Bergamo, but made long stays in Tuscany, in Viareggio (where he settled from 1968 to 1972), developing his partnership with the painter and writer Sandro Luporini. From the 1970s he accentuated his dedication to a painting with an apparently traditional structure, but with luminous effects of extraordinary originality, which reveal correspondences with the work of the great Spanish master Antonio López García. In 1979 he promoted with his friend Luporini the Metacosa group (G. Biagi, G. Bartolini, G. Ferroni, B. Luino, S. Luporini, L. Mannocci, G. Tonelli). In 1982 he was again invited, with his own room, to the Venice Biennale, while his significant and continuous activity as an engraver, begun at the end of the 50s, was documented by a large retrospective exhibition held in Trento in 1985. Anthologies of considerable scope were organized, in the 80s and 90s, in Naples, Bologna and Milan. Ferroni died in Bergamo on May 12, 2001.
Luciano DeVita
Luciano De Vita was born in Ancona on May 24, 1929. After fighting in the Second World War at a very young age, he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, where his teachers were Virgilio Guidi for painting and Giorgio Morandi for engraving. In 1954 Morandi wanted him as his assistant and, after the teacher’s retirement in 1956, De Vita (who saw in Francisco Goya’s etchings a mirror of his existence) was given the chair of engraving in Turin, at the Accademia Albertina, then in 1962, in Milan, at the Accademia di Brera, and held it until 1976. In that year he returned to teach engraving at the Academy of Bologna, where he remained until 1992, the year of his retirement. He took part in major exhibitions, such as the Rome Quadrennial in 1959 and the Venice Biennial in 1960 (where he won a prize for his etchings), and, during the 1960s, he exhibited in solo shows in New York, Rome, Parma and Bologna, at the Galleria de’ Foscherari. In 1975, an anthological exhibition of his works, curated by Andrea Emiliani, inaugurated the new Galleria d’Arte Moderna in the Emilian capital. He was also a sculptor, set designer, costume designer and director, working for the Teatro Comunale in Bologna (Turandot, by G. Puccini, 1969; Otello, by G. Verdi, 1971) and for La Scala in Milan (B. Bartók, Bluebeard’s Castle, 1978). He died in Bologna on 14 July 1992.
Francisco Goya
Francisco Goya y Lucientes was born on March 30, 1746, in Fuendetodos, a small town in Aragon, near Saragossa. After an initial apprenticeship in the workshop of José Luzán, thanks to his friendship with the painter Francisco Bayeu, who had been called to work in Madrid by Anton Raphael Mengs, he entered the circle of Mengs himself, who advised him to take a training trip to Italy. After having been, between 1770 and 1771, in Rome, Parma and other cities of the peninsula, he returned to Spain where he began to receive important commissions, in particular a series of cartoons for tapestries of the Royal Manufactory of Santa Barbara. Having grown in the esteem of the salons of the capital also for some portraits, he managed to be appointed painter of the King’s Chamber by Charles IV in 1789. However, his fortune did not last long. In 1792 a sudden illness almost led to his death, leaving him totally deaf. The eclipse of the world in which he had asserted himself followed that fatal experience: the internal political crisis of Spain, torn between progressives and conservatives, precipitated until the French invasion of 1807-1808. Witness to the contradictions of the time, Goya poured them, already after the aforementioned illness, into an intense activity as an engraver. In Madrid, in 1797, he supervised the printing of the 80 Caprichos (Caprichos), which would be followed by other collections of the kind, intertwined with paintings destined to become almost legendary, such as, in 1805, the Maja vestida and the Maja desnuda. During the Restoration, mentally and physically exhausted, suspect at court for his liberal sympathies, he withdrew increasingly to private life, painting the famous cycle of black paintings in the house of Manzanares, and then seeking refuge in France, where he died in Bordeaux on 16 April 1828.
Carlo Franza