Masters of the 20th Century

Gallery 13 is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition “Masters of the 20th Century – research of figurative art since World War II”, which brings together in a single exhibition great masters of modern Italian art: Renato Guttuso, Mino Maccari, Virgilio Guidi, Antonio Ligabue, Carlo Mattioli, Aligi Sassu, Franco Rognoni, Salvatore Fiume, Alberto Manfredi, and Franz Borghese.
The exhibition will open on Saturday, March 2, at 5:30 p.m. at the headquarters of Gallery 13 at 34/b Via Roma, Reggio Emilia, and will be open free of charge until March 30.
These great masters, all born within two decades in various cities in Italy, adhered in their artistic journey to different movements and groups of the modern avant-garde or chose to embark on solitary paths, but what they have in common is the search for a pictorial neo-expressionism, a new way of recovering the figurative image by bridging the artistic experiences before and after the war, while at the same time seeking new linguistic registers. A need that crosses across these paths and travels back to the rediscovery of forms of a more traditional matrix where the image deteriorates, is consumed and dematerializes within the pictorial texture. Figurative painting, which was no longer able to express the horrors of war, recovers the depth of an image that does not deprive itself of the pleasure of representation and narrative. And so it is that Guttuso depicts the roofs of Sicilian houses plastered in white and Mattioli creates landscapes where color is kneaded into earthy greens; Rognoni makes houses and passers-by emerge from evanescent preifers; and Fiume dissolves his Somali odalisques as if the image were blurred by the hot desert air.