The Giancarlo and Danna Olgiati collection opens the autumn season with the exhibition “Prampolini Burri. Of the subject”. Through a research that runs through the entire 1900s, the exhibition project focuses on the use of eccentric material with respect to medium traditional painting. The protagonists of this continuous line of experimentation on art subjects are Enrico Prampolini (Modena, 1894 – Rome, 1956) and Alberto Burri (Città di Castello, 1915 – Nice, 1995), both active in Rome.
Research on the subject in its multiple expressive methods are investigated in the exhibition at the Olgiati collection through about 50 masterpieces from prestigious international public and private collections. From the Futurist and Polyimateric works of Prampolini to the powerful ones of Burri, the path highlights how the use of matter has been able to give voice to the concerns of a complex historical period, manifesting all its violence and transgressive charge.
Prampolini – eclectic futurist and contact with the most important European avant -garde – experimental with early, already in 1914, the potential of polygrades; Burri, which represents the second half of the twentieth century in the exhibition, was instead fundamental in proposing the matter in the most radical poetic key. “The streets undertaken by Prampolini and Burri, with conceptually different trajectories and meanings, show possible ways, certainly not the only ones, but certainly the most risky, those that renouncing painting understood as pure medium Of centuries -old tradition, they rely on something else, cut out and glue, dig in the lands, use plastics, bags, mold and burn, add objects, and much more. A linguistic revolution that will become, as is known, in the work of Burri, Norma and international style, with a European primacy on which it is worth reflecting “, explain the curator Gabriella Belli and the curator Bruno Corà.
The exhibition “Prampolini Burri. Of the matter” is part of an exhibition triptych promoted by Danna and Giancarlo Olgiati and dedicated to exemplary comparisons between some of the greatest protagonists of the twentieth century and which has already documented the extraordinary contiguity between Balla and Dorazio (2023) and the consonance of poetics between Yves Klein and Arman (2024).
The exhibition. The investigation into the two distinct, but dominant visions of the subject of Prampolini and Burri, unfolds at the Olgiati collection in an exhibition space
radical, conceived for the occasion by Mario Botta in two subsequent and separated moments. Opposite chromatic choices mark the path of the exhibition, which opens with the works of Prampolini, set up on white walls, and continues with the works of Burri, who impose themselves on completely black walls.
Active in the field of painting and, among other things, of scenography, architecture and applied arts, Prampolini adheres to Futurism in 1912, however declining its principles in a totally autonomous and European breath experimentation. If in the 1920s the complex Prampolinian production tends towards mechanical art, as evident, on display, in masterpieces such as Caprese landscape (or Vesuvian), About 1922, is with Interview with the subject of 1930 which opens the most feltly visionary and cosmic phase of its production. In the painting – a real manifesto – the most diverse materials, sponge, cork, galalite, limit space more and more, first dominated by painting. It is a disobedience to the traditional techniques that the artist already anticipates several years earlier, in 1914, in a refined experimentation, Béguinage, Polymoteric assembly also present on display in Lugano.
There are several masterpieces presented to the Olgiati collection by the series of the famous Polyimateric paintings of the thirties of Prampolini. Unpublished metamorphosis of the forms open up in works such as Venus mechanics, 1930, or the magnificent Aerodynamic geometry1934-1935, while Forces forces in space of 1932 is a powerful representation of alien worlds dominated by the geometry between new psychic forces of organic forms; And, again, the famous polynimaterics of the 1930s – early forty, like thePolymoteric automatism f of 1941. These are works, which arise from a fertile humus of international contacts, fabriced by the artist in Paris since the 1920s between different movements, such as surrealism and astract-conditted painters, more similar to him, when he adheres to the Parisian group of Cerble et carré.
“As Prampolini has been able to extricate himself between these two currents, to summarize them in a stylistic and meaning convergence, capable of uniting aspects of one and the other, it is the significant figure of this new phase of his work, which brings the seal of a precious internationality for his career, but also for the parterre of Italian painting of the time”, underlines the curator Gabriella Belli.
In the 1950s, the last Polimateric paintings on display in Lugano, such as Abstract composition CR1954, the masterpiece of the same year Abstract voltagesto finish with the Composition S 6: sulfur and cobalt From 1955: works that testify how, thanks to the continuous evolution of forms and ways listening with the times, Prampolini proved to be a point of reference for many painters who appeared in art in the late 1940s.
The intuitive conceptions of Burri in terms of use of the matter are far from the theore
Izzazioni by Prampolini. In the aftermath of the Second World War I lived in first person as a medical officer, prisoner in Africa and then to Hereford in Texas, who became self -taught artist he undertakes the search for a new language. After a brief debut in the figures, starting from 1948, Burri decides to obtain pictorial qualities from the gesture of presentation of the matter, emptying it with every possible metaphor.
It is a humble and raw material, which comes to replace the color, that of Burri; A matter in which he seems to seek the same inexhaustible artistic act, a new degree of form and beauty. “The attitude to the challenge, the prediction, the analysis, the ethical tension, the inclination to the compositional faculty, the innate sense of geometry, the ease in the use of any material available (…), direct the qualities and objectives of ‘redemption’ of the future painter destined to influence, from the post -war period onwards, on the sensitivity of making painting and sculpture in the international art scene”, explains the curator Bruno Corà.
The exhibition in Lugano presents several exemplary works, from the cycles of the early years, to Compositionsto the Catramas of the years 1948-1950 up to Bagsmasterpieces that bring Burri’s art to a definitive material dimension.
After the experiments with the most diverse materials – from tar to pumice stone, from gold to plaster, and many others – the artist begins to use fire in the forming action of the work. On display, several works, including Plastic And Plastic red1962, are the results of an incessant intervention carried out by the artist with the flame dispenser on the canvas, plastic and vinavil or aluminum in hand, while attacking and opens gates, burn central areas and hems, revealing an unknown material territory.
After fire, with the famous CrettiBurri passes to the elaboration of the other cornerstones of the size of the matter: earth, air and water. A new manifestation of material spatiality occurs in rare works of the seventies, such as Black black cretto, 1972, or in Cretto white c11973. The exhibition in Lugano ends with some works in Cellotex of the eighties and nineties, such as Cellotex1980, e Black and gold, (1993). Ilfi and opaque, the Cellotex, a wooden compound used in the industrial field, is the subject that in the hands of Burri comes to view the size of silence, darkness, but also of emptiness, full and absence, all new aesthetic coordinates that will influence some of the most advanced subsequent research.
On the occasion of the exhibition, a bilingual catalog will be published (Italian-English) published by Mousse Publishing with an introduction by Giancarlo and Danna Olgiati, the historical-critical-scientific essays of Gabriella Belli and Bruno Corà, a conversation between Gabriella Bello and Mario Botta, as well as the bio-bibliographic apparatuses and the cards of the works.
Carlo Franza