Venue:
Arca, ex chiesa di San Marco, Vercelli.

Curator:
Luca Massimo Barbero.

Artists:
Arman, Enrico Baj, Peter Blake, Alberto Burri, Enrico Castellani, Lucio Del Pezzo, Jean Dubuffet, Lucio Fontana, Raymond Hains, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Hans Hofmann, Jasper Johns, Allen Jones, Willem de Kooning, Bice Lazzari, Roy Lichtenstein, Morris Louis, Agnes Martin, Mario Nigro, Kenneth Noland, Pino Pascali, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Mel Ramos, Robert Rauschenberg, Man Ray, James Rosenquist, Mimmo Rotella, Mark Rothko, Emilio Scanavino, Paolo Scheggi, Mario Schifano, Frank Stella, Antoni Tàpies, Mark Tobey, Cy Twombly, Günther Uecker, Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselmann.

Exhibition description:
The exhibition sets out to illustrate the artistic panorama of the sixties. It does so by confronting European and American creativity in a transoceanic dialogue. This approach reveals parallelisms that disclose a new dimension of visual culture. 1964 saw the triumph of American Pop Art at the Venice Biennale. Robert Rauschenberg was awarded the Grand Prix for painting, signalling a shift in the art system’s center of gravity from Paris to New York. For the first time European art lost its cultural dominance over the United States. The exhibition narrates this transition through different avenues of research, exploring three segments of intentionality—those of pictorial reduction through the use of monochrome, the new values given to objectivity and structure, and the evolution of a demotic figurative language drawn from media icons and advertising imagery. Monochrome, this new figuration, and pictorial experimentation of a synthetic, almost conceptual kind, were the poles between which the American and European artistic research moved, in a complex coexistence.

Partnerships:
Organized by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in partnership with the Regione Piemonte and the Comune di Vercelli.

Catalogue:
Barbero, Luca Massimo. Gli anni Sessanta nelle collezioni Guggenheim. Oltre l'Informale verso la Pop art. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation; Biella: Eventi & progetti, 2013.

Catalogue in Italian, with acknowledgements by Michele Coppola (Assessore alla cultura, Regione Piemonte), Andrea Corsaro (Mayor, Comune di Vercelli), Pier Giorgio Fossale (Assessore alla Cultura per l’Economia della Conoscenza, Comune di Vercelli), Richard Armstrong (Director, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Museum) and Philip Rylands (Director, Peggy Guggenheim Collection). The catalogue contains essays by Luca Massimo Barbero, Sileno Salvagnini and Francesca Pola, as well as color plates of the works on display and biographies of the artists featured in the exhibition.

Library Location: GUGG PGC 2013 .03, UFFICIO 2013.