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Palermo, “Beyond Quasimodo”: 27 watercolors by the poet on display at the Riso Museum

The exhibition, visible until December 31, 2024, reveals the unpublished side of Salvatore Quasimodo through 27 gouaches, unique visual experiments of the poet, kept for decades in Germany.

Palermo, “Beyond Quasimodo”: 27 watercolors by the poet on display at the Riso Museum.

An exhibition at the Riso Museum in Palermo brings together, more than thirty years after the only exhibition, the 27 watercolours created by the poet Salvatore Quasimodo in 1953. The Nobel Prize winner's only foray into the world of visual arts, The works have been kept in the vault of a German bank for fifty years.

The exhibition entitled “Beyond Quasimodo. The 27 gouaches. I already knew everything, and I wanted to sin”, will be open from Friday 6 December at 17.30:31 pm until next December XNUMX at the Regional Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Riso. Entrance will be possible from Tuesday to Saturday, from 9 to 18:30, Sunday and holidays from 9 to 13, last entrance 30 minutes before closing time, there is no additional cost in addition to the museum ticket, equal to 7 euros.

Palermo, "Oltre Quasimodo": 27 acquerelli del poeta in mostra al Museo Riso

Salvatore Quasimodo (Modica 1901– Naples 1968) was fascinated by the visual arts, but his only experiment in the field was a series of 27 gouaches born almost by chance, in 1953, an intellectual game that soon ran out of steam and that the Sicilian poet wanted destroyed. But his friend Alberto Lùcia kept them and in 1993 the poet's son, Alessandro Quasimodo, gathered them in a precious book associating them with as many poems united by the word "heart". Thirty years after the exhibition on the poet, in Rome in 1994, where the originals of the gouaches were presented for the only time, the heirs of Alberto Lùcia are now granting the loan of the precious collection that they jealously guard and protect.

«A precious exhibition - Says the regional councilor for Cultural Heritage and Sicilian Identity, Francesco Paolo Scarpinato - which allows us to discover an unpublished and unexpected side of the great Nobel Prize winner. The fact that these works are visible again, after more than thirty years from the last exhibition and above all that they are returning to Sicily, is a tangible sign of the cultural ferment that animates Palermo and of the attention paid to making our cultural assets, museums and galleries increasingly attractive and competitive».

In short, the genesis of the works exhibited: his friend and poet Alberto Lùcia goes to visit Quasimodo in his Milanese studio with a package in his hand, inside there is a box with colors and a brush that are about to be sent to Paris, to the address of the playwright from Messina Beniamino Joppolo, recently converted to abstract painting. Quasimodo is curious and opens the package; and at that point, the challenge arises: the poet probably wants to demonstrate how “easy” it is, even for an inexperienced person, to express oneself with the models of abstract art. The days pass and in a short time the poet creates 27 gouaches: “It is clear that a joke cannot last that long”, writes Rossana Bossaglia. The probable beginning in a joking tone turns into a long series of small compositions, the intellectual game takes over and opens for Quasimodo the way towards the “understanding of the image as a sign-abstraction”, as Alberto Lùcia writes. Quasimodo gives him the gouaches when he decides not to continue with the experiment and thinks of destroying them. Lùcia, who died in 1995, had the gouaches reproduced with a laser to avoid the exposure ruining the originals; some of these reproductions are exhibited at Quasimodo's house-museum and have been part of exhibitions dedicated to the poet. Milano and in Messina.

«This precious exhibition on Quasimodo's works - Said the director of the Riso Museum, Evelina De Castro - It is connected to the permanent collection of the Riso which hosts artists such as Accardi, Consagra and Sanfilippo, protagonists of the years of cultural debate in which the Nobel Prize-winning poet also moved».

Palermo, "Oltre Quasimodo": 27 acquerelli del poeta in mostra al Museo Riso

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