Milano: Palazzo Reale and the Museo del Novecento open the exhibition dedicated to Mario Nigro

Milano: Palazzo Reale and the Museo del Novecento open the exhibition dedicated to Mario Nigro.

It opens to the public Friday 14 July, the largest exhibition ever dedicated to Mario Nigro (Pistoia 1917 – Livorno 1992), protagonist of the Italian art scene of the '900, which opens to the public from July 14 at two locations: Royal Palace (until September 17) e Museo del Novecento (until November 5).

Promoted by the Municipality of Milano-Culture, produced by Palazzo Reale, Museo del Novecento and Eight Art Project, the exhibition is created in collaboration with the Mario Nigro Archive and curated by Antonella Soldaini and Elena Tettamanti.

They are over one hundred and forty exhibited works by 1947 until the last of 1992 between paintings, three-dimensional works, its paper and a large selection di papers. The exhibition includes works exhibited at the Venice Biennials of 1964, 1968, 1978, 1982, 1986 and at the X Quadrennial of Rome in 1973.

In collaboration with the PAC Pavilion of Contemporary Art a conference will remember the terrorist-mafia attack of 27 July 1993, which, in addition to the spaces of the Pavilion, destroyed a work by Mario Nigro and damaged his other works which were to be exhibited in an anthology dedicated to the artist who had passed away a year earlier. The meeting was born precisely from the reflection on this tragic attack that struck Milano and Italy and represents the most appropriate way to affirm, thirty years later, the primacy of art and culture over crime.

At Royal Palace the route marks i different stylistic moments of the artist. It develops through eight rooms on the main floor di Royal Palace that they retrace Nigro's activity with paintings and three-dimensional works created starting from the second half of the 1940s: works that bear witness to an experimental artistic language and a strong orientation towards abstract and geometric compositional structures.
From first works which already suggest a thematic horizon marked by concepts di “rhythm”, “forms” and “space”, recurring in the artist's research, the result of his scientific studies and his knowledge of musical compositional structures up to the most original cycle of "total space” where, starting from 1952, there was a need to go beyond formal issues and leave room for more expressly existential themes.
With the introduction between the 1962 and the 1964 of a new one perceptual dynamics through the collage technique, so as to attenuate the grid structure that had characterized his production until then, the new series of "vibrant collages” presented at the XXXII Venice Biennale in 1964 in which he participated at the invitation of Lucio Fontana.
Starting from the middle of sixties, Black combines chromatic freedom with the need to obtain a greater geometric structuring, thus establishing a vital dialogue with architecture. A typology of works a environmental character the work belongs”From the total space: modular in 7 pieces in simultaneous contrast of rhythmic progressions” (1965), which contains a particular symbolic value in its story: the work is similar to "From Total Space Totem, 1954-1956” (1965), work destroyed during the 1993 attack on the PAC Pavilion of Contemporary Art di Milano.
With the company cycle "total time” the pictorial activity that goes develops by 1966 to 1979 where the line becomes the protagonist of the language. The works defined by the artist himself “fixed structures with chromatic license“, are characterized by the dialogue between the “color sign” and the monochromatic background and also deal with the theme of love, experienced both as a sexual drive and as a romantic desire.
All late seventies they date back works of a metaphysical nature in which a single line asymmetrically divides the panels and whose background is characterized by a color in shades of green, lilac, light blue-blue, red like "From the metaphysics of color: geometric elementary structural concepts, Hector and Andromache” (1978) exhibited at the Venice Biennale of the same year.
The absolute centrality of the line continues in the new research of “earthquakes” and the “horizons“. In this last case the path does not touch the ends of the canvas, but stops first to emphasize a sense of solitude. Having abandoned precise and rigorous logic, his painting becomes increasingly introspective to the point of segmenting the line into its inseparable unit, the point.
From 1987 until 1992, the year of his death, we are witnessing an increase in pictorial cycles. Come on "portraits” based on reflection on the action of painting to the "satanic paintings” in which the brushstroke imposes itself like a solid column that almost completely fills the field and where the color becomes more dramatic to arrive in the last years of his life, reactivating the interest in a light palette, at “structures“, created between 1990 and 1992 of which the exhibition includes “6 structures” (1991) and “25 structures” (1992), the last work painted by the artist.

In the Archive Space of the Museum of the Twentieth Century one is exposed large selection of documents and it is possible deepen your knowledge of jobs on paper. Among the materials of documentation from the Mario Nigro Archive, some never previously exhibited, there are notes, letters, brochures, catalogs and invitations, texts by the artist relating to the cycle "total space“, some shots by photographers, including Aurelio Amendola, Nataly Maier, Maria Mulas and Ugo Mulas. The work on paper emerges as a central and recurring place in his multifaceted journey, which can be considered a thought laboratory, an incubator of ideas and an image workshop. The sequence of works on paper, which is ideally linked to what is presented in the exhibition at Palazzo Reale, allows you to follow the different pictorial cycles of the artist's work. In particolare, are exposed examples of the named series "checkered panels” and precious drawings, which are the genesis from which Nigro develops the cycle of “total space“, all conceived in the 1950s. At the “total time”, which began in the second half of the sixties, at the “earthquakes“, designed between 1980 and 1981, up to the “horizons" and at "elm“, dating back to the 1980s, to the “meditations" and at "structures“, carried out in the nineties, refer to the works created with tempera, pastel and watercolor on canvassed paper which allowed the artist to reach considerable dimensions, while remaining within the scope of the work on paper.

Within of the review "Performing PAC. Dance with me To the End of Love” (11 July – 10 September), dedicated to relationship between art and memory on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the Via Palestro massacre, Mario Nigro's work “Senza titolo” (1952) is exhibited in the section focused on the reconstruction of the attack set up as a large timeline.
Il The thematic conference will be held on 25 July at 18.30 pm "Memory exercises. Mario Nigro 1993” – introduced by Diego Sileo, moderated by Antonella Soldaini and Elena Tettamanti, with the participation of Gianni Nigro, Luigi Sansone, Angela Vettese – recalls his exhibition which was never realized and the works seriously damaged in the attack.
Il catalog, Published by Silvana Editorial, contains an essay by Antonella Soldaini, an interview by Elena Tettamanti with Tommaso Trini on the work and figure of Mario Nigro, an essay by Francesca Pola dedicated to the work on paper, a detailed chronology and an updated bio-bibliographic apparatus.