Lucio Fontana (1899‐ 1968), Piero Dorazio (1927‐2005), Enrico Castellani (b. 1930), Paolo Scheggi (1940‐1971) and Rodolfo Aricò (1930‐2002) are the five pioneering artists of the exhibition Postwar. Italian Protagonists, at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection from 23 February until 15 April 2013. Curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, the exhibition is a re‐reading of Italian art in the wake of the Informel painting that prevailed in the 1950s. The ‘protagonists’ brought the Italian art scene to an international public with a pictorial language specific to the early 60s, a new painting using the power of color and the iconography of the monochrome as defining visual and conceptual elements. The exhibition unfolds chronologically, showcasing the experimentation of each artist as, departing from the work of Lucio Fontana, these new generations developed a personal language at a critical moment of their artistic practice between the 60s and 70s.
Postwar. Italian Protagonists offers the public two moments of special interest. Tribute is paid to Paolo Scheggi, a Tuscan artist who died young and whose experimentation and profound artistic sensibilities are rediscovered here. Among his eight works on display is Intersuperficie curva bianca (1963), recently donated to the museum by Franca and Cosima Scheggi. The spotlight is also shone on Rodolfo Aricò in two rooms which, together with an accompanying publication of his artistic production from the 1960s, were made possible by the collaboration of the Archivio Rodolfo Aricò.
Lucio Fontana opens the exhibition, as a father figure in Italian and international post‐war and contemporary art. Concetto Spaziale (1951) and Concetto Spaziale (1957), recent donations to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, exemplify respectively the monochromatic ground of Fontana’s “buchi” (holes) and his more matière based work, which together lead us to the vestiges of Informel in Quanta (1960), a masterly work loaned by the Fondazione Lucio Fontana in Milan. Its nine red three‐dimensional shapes form a kind of constellation of cuts and holes which anticipate the shaped canvases of American art in the same period. In its conceptual essentialism this work sets up a contrapuntal dialogue with Fontana’s ceramics of the 50s, three plates suspended between the Baroque and the great explosion of Art Informel.
The exhibition proceeds with a selection of five works by Piero Dorazio, one of the founders of Italian abstract painting, centered upon his artistic practice between 1962 and 1965. His optical and structural lattices expand across the canvas in paintings such as Antelucano (1962), demonstrating the clarity of a rigorous symbolic system articulated in line and especially color. Dorazio's abstract style is strongly characterized in Mar Maraviglia (1962) and Unitas (1965, Peggy Guggenheim Collection), focal point of this second gallery together with Durante l'Incertezza (1965), a canvas of monumental proportions (225 x 320 cm) that functions as a kind of response to the mural‐sized works of contemporary American painting and testifies to the artist’s continuous dialogue with the U.S. scene.