Italian posters that shine in the US. Exhibition in New York (photo: Ansa)
16:33, 18 feb•NEW YORK •ANSA writing
(ANSA) – NEW YORK, FEB 18 – New York celebrates the history of Italian commercial signs, many of them considered true works of art.
The contamination between avant-garde art and commercial posters in Italy, with special attention to the years between the two wars and the first post-war, as well as the country’s economic boom, is the focus of an exhibition at the CIMA (Italian Modern Art Center ) In New York.
Inaugurated last Thursday, and until June 10, around 30 posters of the main institutions and collections of Italian companies are on display.
They are signed by artists such as Herbert Carboni, Fortunato Depero, Nikolai Diulgheroff, Lucio Fontana, Max Huber, Bruno Munari, Marcello Nizzoli, Bob Noorda, Giovanni Pintori, Mario Sironi, and Albe Steiner.
His works illustrated the products of companies that have been part of the history of the Italian economy. Among them, Barilla, Campari, Olivetti, Fiat, and Pirelli.
“The basic idea was to examine the relationship between Italian avant-garde art and a certain enlightened commercial clientele that existed between the 1920s and the 1960s,” the exhibition’s curator, Nicola Lucchi, told ANSA.
“It is a time when Italian companies are discovering consumerism and relying on advertising offices, which call on artists to collaborate, and avant-garde and futurist artists are the first to propose themselves as interpreters of the products,” he added.
“This generates an important artistic relationship that we have tried to explore in its various facets,” Lucchi explained.
The show’s curator noted that “posters have often been described as derivative, but the exhibition highlights how, starting with Futurism, Italian posters have acquired a visual and communicative force that has elevated the medium to a form of artistic expression. in its own right, pushing the frontiers of lithographic techniques, photomontage and typography”.
“The peculiar ambition of commercial posters to provide attractive forms and content to the masses, rather than to an elite circle, also makes them the object of socio-economic and philosophical interest,” he continued.
The exhibition covers from 1926, the year in which Depero exhibited a “publicity painting” at the Venice Biennale, Squisito al selz, and continues until 1957.
The exhibition illustrates how the design of Italian commercial signs developed hand in hand with the artistic currents of its time.
And as a visual and conceptual counterpoint to the narrative path traced by commercial posters, the exhibition also includes some works by Mimmo Rotella.
“Rotella begins with informal art and in the 1950s he realizes that the figures are actually around him, and they are commercial signs,” added the curator. “The gesture is to tear them off the walls and put them on the canvas.”
(ANSA).
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