FROM DEPERO TO ROTELLA: ITALIAN COMMERCIAL POSTERS BETWEEN ADVERTISING AND ART
The exhibition examines the cross-pollination involving avant-garde art and business posters in Italy, with a specific emphasis on the interwar yr and the early post-WW2 era, for the duration of the country’s economic increase.
With a starting up date in 1926 (the year in which Depero exhibited the Venice Biennale a “quadro pubblicitario”, Squisito al selz) and an excellent closing day in 1957 (the 12 months in which the tv marketing exhibit Carosello very first aired on Italy’s community television network RAI), the exhibition will illustrate how the design and style of Italian industrial posters moved hand in hand with the inventive currents of its occasions. Though poster artwork has frequently been explained as spinoff in character, the exhibit will demonstrate how, from Futurism onwards, Italian posters acquired a visual and communicative drive that elevated the medium to a form of creative expression in its own appropriate, pushing the boundaries of lithographic approaches, photomontage, and typography. The commercial posters’ peculiar ambition to produce alluring varieties and contents to the masses, somewhat than to an elite circle, also make them an object of socioeconomic and philosophical interest.
The exhibition will consist of some 30 posters from important Italian institutions and corporate collections, as effectively as a number of, select personal collections in the United States. Amongst the artists featured: Erberto Carboni, Fortunato Depero, Nikolai Diulgheroff, Lucio Fontana, Max Huber, Bruno Munari, Marcello Nizzoli, Bob Noorda, Giovanni Pintori, Xanti Schawinsky, Mario Sironi, Albe Steiner. The will work of these people today illustrated the items of organizations that built the history of the Italian economy, such as Barilla, Campari, Olivetti, Fiat, Pirelli.
As a visible and conceptual counterpoints to the narrative route traced by the industrial posters, the exhibition will also incorporate a handful of artworks by Mimmo Rotella. An artist in the regular sense of the phrase, Rotella’s décollages and retro d’affiches flip the medium of the commercial poster onto by itself, in a gesture of critique and self-reflection.
The Call for FELLOWSHIP Applications for this exhibition is now closed.
