FROM DEPERO TO ROTELLA: ITALIAN COMMERCIAL POSTERS BETWEEN ADVERTISING AND ART

The exhibition examines the cross-pollination amongst avant-garde artwork and commercial posters in Italy, with a distinct concentrate on the interwar 12 months and the early publish-WW2 period, through the country’s financial increase.  

With a starting date in 1926 (the yr in which Depero exhibited the Venice Biennale a “quadro pubblicitario”, Squisito al selz) and an ideal closing date in 1957 (the 12 months in which the tv advertising exhibit Carosello to start with aired on Italy’s general public tv set community 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. Whilst poster art has often been described as spinoff in character, the display will exhibit how, from Futurism onwards, Italian posters obtained a visible and communicative force that elevated the medium to a sort of artistic expression in its very own proper, pushing the boundaries of lithographic approaches, photomontage, and typography. The industrial posters’ peculiar ambition to deliver alluring sorts and contents to the masses, fairly than to an elite circle, also make them an object of socioeconomic and philosophical fascination. 

The exhibition will include some 30 posters from key Italian institutions and corporate collections, as well as a couple, choose personal collections in the United States. Among 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 works of these folks illustrated the goods of firms that made the background of the Italian economic system, these as Barilla, Campari, Olivetti, Fiat, Pirelli.  

As a visible and conceptual counterpoints to the narrative path traced by the commercial posters, the exhibition will also involve a couple of artworks by Mimmo Rotella. An artist in the common perception of the term, Rotella’s décollages and retro d’affiches flip the medium of the commercial poster on to itself, in a gesture of critique and self-reflection. 

The Get in touch with for FELLOWSHIP Applications for this exhibition is now shut.