NATURAL STORIES AND SPIRITUAL JOURNEYS
FROM 19 FEBRUARY TO 18 June 2017
After the success of the exhibition Joan Miró and the Surrealists, which received the interest of a wide audience, with 12,000 visitors, MARTE proposes for 2017 a new exhibition: Pablo Picasso and other travelers, defined by the subtitle natural stories and spiritual journeys , sponsored by MARTE in collaboration with the industry Museums and Libraries of the Province of Salerno and with the historical-critical contribution of Marco Alfano. This exhibition looks at interior of the great Spanish artist’s experience, and it identifies a line of attention to figuration, which since the metaphorical world of animals – the “little people” as written by Anna Maria Ortese – comes to the meaning of the journey as a spiritual experience.
The exhibition will present forty-six original works by Pablo Picasso, including engravings, lithographs and ceramics, from two important complete sets:
1) Histoire Naturelle of Buffon (1942): thirty-one etchings, etchings and aquatints with sugar, and 2) the five major color lithographs of the Barcelona Suite (1966), a true synthesis of Picasso’s path. It’s a spiritual journey that closes around the Mediterranean, with ceramic colors: plates, vases, earthenware plates, in short, the vast repertoire of objects re-created by the genius of Picasso. In the latters they connect other forty paintings, graphics and ceramics by important artists “travelers” landed on the Salerno coast.
The exhibition circuit also hosts a photographic documentation and major videos, mail to the exhibition rooms kit: these are reproductions from famous authors who worked with Picasso from the forties to the sixties: by Robert Capa to Henri Cartier-Bresson, from Herbert List to René Burri, but also the famous film Le Mystère Picasso (1955) by Henri-Georges Clouzot, one of the few explicit statements of poetics that Picasso has left us.
There is no doubt that the Amalfi coast has been a source of inspiration, travel destination, a magic place, where the European artistic culture honed his reasons and identity. You can therefore follow the development of this imaginary, drawing a phenomenology of experiences, meetings, discoveries, but also of signs, colors, suggested by a fertile land of imaginative memory, which from Vietri sul Mare arrives to the sunny beaches of Positano, going up to the enchanting villas of Ravello.
The central theme is the “formation” of the artists’ look in front of the amazing scenery of the Coast, the inseparable connection between the values of the natural environment and those marked by human intervention. The exhibition route, starting from the experience of Pablo Picasso, composes a fascinating storyline between memory and modernity: from the “transcendent” Maurits Cornelis Escher to Oskar Kokoschka, from the chromatic subtleties of Han Harloff to Ivan Zagoruiko’s red-hot expressiveness, up to “verticals” landscapes of Manfredi Nicoletti; from the ceramics of the “German period” of Richard Dölker, Irene Kowaliska, Bab Hannasch, to the innovation plastic of Guido Gambone and Savior and Joshua Procida, and the multifaceted creative experience of Ugo Marano. From an European engraving master like Peter Willburger to the protagonists of actual art Peter Ruta and Mimmo Paladino. Showcasing more than forty works, including paintings, drawings, watercolors, engravings and ceramics coming from the collections of the Provincial Museum and private collections.