Venue:
Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

Curator:
Luca Massimo Barbero.

Artists:
Vincenzo Agnetti, Francis Bacon, Carlo Carrà, Gianni Colombo, Dadamaino, Arthur Duff, Lucio Fontana, Bice Lazzari, Riccardo de Marchi, Mirko, Piet Mondrian, François Morellet, Mario Nigro, Gastone Novelli, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Rudolf Stingel, Rufino Tamayo, Lawrence Weiner.

Exhibition description:
The exhibition promotes an exhibition formula that offers visitors fresh perceptions of the museum’s collections, whether known or less known, by means of a dialogue with works by more contemporary artists from other collections, thus opening up new, multiple possible interpretations. Works from the early 20th century avant-garde connect thematically in a confrontation and comparison with post war and contemporary works, tracing the evolution of forms of visual expression as they change with time.

Beginning with Modernist works from early last century, such as Cubism and Futurism, the exhibition looks at the use of script: as language, as sign in the works of Pablo Picasso and of the Italian Futurist Carlo Carrà to the more contemporary script of Lawrence Weiner and Vincenzo Agnetti. Other thematic rooms follow, in which Piet Mondrian’s rigid geometries are offset by Gianni Colombo’s flexible, and elastic spaces and by the self-contained spaces of Mario Nigro. Uniformly patterned works, with a density to the point of congestion by Rudolf Stingel, contrast with Jackson Pollock’s allover calligraphy. Writing-as-sign in Bice Lazzari compares with the cryptic vocabulary of marks in Dadamaino and Riccardo de Marchi. Then again, in a gallery dedicated to nature, a roaring lion by Mirko contradicts the complacency of a chimpanzee by Francis Bacon. With Celestial Bodies by Rufino Tamayo, the exhibition engages the notion of cosmic space, understood as a multiplicity of perspectives, with works by François Morellet, Arthur Duff and Lucio Fontana.
A tribute to Gastone Novelli, a major figure in Italian art in the 1950s and 60s, closes the exhibition. Gastone Novelli and Venice presents his poetical inscriptions on outsize canvases, in which marks, colors, and words are suspended in a delicate balance, exploring his relation to Venice. Together with rare sketchbooks of the 1960s which depict Venice, there are canvases painted between 1964 and 1968, few of them ever exhibited prior to this exhibition, in which Venice may be either his subject or the place of his studio. 1968 was a critical year for Novelli—he was at the center of the polemics and the protests against the Biennale that year, where he turned the paintings in his one-man show to the wall, thus linking himself and his work to a now legendary episode in the student riots of that year.

Partnerships:
Organized by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in partnership with Archivio Gastone Novelli, Rome.

Catalogue:
Barbero, Luca Massimo. Gastone Novelli and Venice. Rome: De Luca Editori d’Arte, 2011.

Bilingual catalogue, in English and Italian. Catalogue includes a preface by Richard Armstrong (Director, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Museum) and Philip Rylands (Director, Peggy Guggenheim Collection), essays by Luca Massimo Barbero and Marco Rinaldi, and a list of plates with a biography of Novelli by Maria Bonmassar.

Library location: GUGG PGC 2011.07.