Brescia celebrates Giuseppe Bergomi (1953), an artist from Brescia among the major exponents of contemporary figurative sculpture, with a retrospective open until 1 December 2024 spread across the cloisters of San Salvatore and Santa Maria in Solario of the Museum of Santa Giulia and the rooms of the Big mile in the Castle.
Giuseppe Bergomi. Sculptures 1982 / 2024curated by the Brescia Museums Foundation, is made up of 84 works in terracotta and bronze, created throughout the artist’s career. The exhibition is part of a larger project dedicated to sculpture in the spaces of the Brescia Castle that the Brescia Museums Foundation inaugurated with the exhibition Davide Rivalta. Dreams of Glory (Castello, 26 May 2023-15 January 2024) identifying in this iconic place a space to dedicate to the valorization of plastic art, in view of the upcoming inauguration of an open-air sculpture itinerary dedicated to Bruno Romeda and his companion and colleague Robert Courtright.
In Santa Giulia, however, the dialogue with the spaces of the Unesco Corridor is in ideal continuity with the experience of Archaeological stageswhich in the last three years has led artists such as Francesco Vezzoli, Emilio Isgrò and Fabrizio Plessi to confront the architecture of the monumental complex of Santa Giulia and the Archaeological Park.
The itinerary, arranged chronologically, begins in 1978, the year in which Bergomi, fresh from graduating from the Brera Academy, made his debut at the Galleria dell’Incisione in Brescia with an exhibition of paintings only, one of which, Lyon 1958also opens the current exhibition. The pivotal moment, capable of giving a turning point to his professional history and convincing him to leave painting for the third dimension was the exhibition The Realisms 1919-1939 at the Center Beaubourg in Paris, as Bergomi himself said, “this exhibition allowed me to understand that I had fallen into a misunderstanding”.
His career in the field of sculpture began in 1982, with a personal exhibition at the Galleria dell’Incisione, where he proposed the first series of polychrome terracotta, composed of intellectually mature works, but technically still in need of study and further study. In this exhibition, today, you can admire some of these works, characterized by the presence of his wife Alma as a model, a subject who will be a constant – like his daughters Valentina and Ilaria – of his research until recent days, and who underlines the importance of the biographical aspect in each of his creations.
The exhibition continues with the phase in which, between the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s of the last century, Bergomi’s terracottas lose their color. In this way, the artist takes up the millenary sculptural tradition that has its roots in ancient plastic, in particular the Etruscan one, in an attempt to reconstruct, through the plasticity of the earth, an organic form. Works such as Sleeping bather (1991), Large Nude of a Teenage Girl (1991) or some portraits of his daughters Valentina and Ilaria, where the human figure is balanced between the realism of the representation and the projection of the subjects in an abstract dimension, full of symbolic references.
In the 2000s, Bergomi moved from terracotta to bronze, giving rise to a new phase in his work. Exemplary works of this period are Bathroom interior with female figure (2001), the busts of Ilaria with hats of different shapes, two bas-reliefs of his wife, or even one of his Self portrait (2004), in which colour, albeit on a new material support, returns to being a characterising element.
These are the creations of these years, among which the grandiose Ellipsedeliberately set up in a suggestive section hosted in the external spaces of the Santa Giulia museum, which amaze with the incredible dialogue between the volumes and the architecture of the monastery. In more recent years Bergomi has accepted the challenge of dealing with public statuary: from Men, dolphins, parallelepipeds made in 2000 for the Nagoya Aquarium in Japan, at monument dedicated to Cristina Trivulzio of Belgiojosothe first public sculpture ever dedicated to a woman in Milan, up to the monument for the victims of Covid, Expulsion from Paradisefor the Vantiniano cemetery in Brescia, of which a plaster model is presented. The exhibition ideally closes with the magnificent Africa with celloexhibited at the 2011 Venice Biennale, and the unpublished work Breakfast in bed (2024) which, through the depiction of his wife, daughters and granddaughters, pays homage to three generations of his family. The exhibition is made possible thanks to the precious Romeda Fund for Contemporary Art.
Carlo Franza