Date: 25/11/2016

Event: Liberty in Italy, artists in search of the modern

The Berardi Gallery on the occasion of the Palazzo Magnani exhibition (5 November 2016 – 14 February 2017) dedicated to Liberty in Italy, lends 3 highly representative works: Portrait in yellow by Arturo Noci, Spring dreams by Gino Piccioni and the Conca dei buffali by Duilio Cambellotti.

Seven sections that bring together nearly 300 works: paintings, sculptures, graphics, architectural and decorative projects, posters, ceramics, carefully selected loans from the most important Italian museums and extraordinary private collections. Many of these loans are the result of the most recent studies and come out of the collections showing themselves to the general public for the first time.

Each section of the exhibition – dedicated to the dialogue between the different arts – highlights the alternation between the two “souls” of Italian Liberty: the properly floral one and the “modernist” one, more restless and closer to European influences, and which will lead from then to the research of the avant-gardes and the development in a more stylized and essential key of the decorative language.

“Within a broader and more general idea of” Italian Liberty “- anticipate the Curators Francesco Parisi and Anna Villari – we wanted to compare the two different trends; trying to support in this way the historical artistic debate of the time which identified, as the true essence of Liberty, the flowing, floral and decorative line and, on the other hand, recovering the critical model of contemporary literature that identified in Liberty everything that it was considered modern and breaking, thus also including those experiences not properly classifiable in Italy as floral but rather modernist or secessionist “.

The exhibition itinerary develops according to a scan by “traditional” sections: painting, sculpture, mural decoration, ceramics, artist’s houses projects (as a new key to enter the project idea of ​​the architect who works, exceptionally and with maximum freedom of expression, for himself), posters, illustration and original graphics.

Red thread that connects all the sections: the graphic line and the research on the sign, which were at the time the basis of the design and formal conception of each work, both of the more properly flowing and floral one, and of the more severe and modern one. In fact, they approached paintings, sculptures, ceramics, large advertising posters, preparatory sketches, cartoons for frescoes, drawings relating to vases, illustrations, engravings.

An unusual key that reveals, entering the heart of the “doing” and in the artist’s mind, the true conceptual and expressive essence of Liberty, a movement, a trend and a fashion that, after more than a hundred years, has not yet exhausted its seductive power.