Installation view mostra Munch La rivoluzione espressionista

MUNCH. The Expressionist Revolution

Curated by: Elisabetta Barisoni

The successful programme of exhibitions conceived by the Fondazione Musei Civici for the Centro Culturale Candiani continues, having been renewed by the exhibition Kandinsky e le avanguardie in 2022, Chagall. Il colore di sogni in 2023 and Matisse e la luce del Mediterraneo in 2024. These exhibitions are based on the civic collections preserved in the Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna.
The new project starts from the graphic collections of Ca’ Pesaro, which contains four exemplary graphic works by Edvard Munch executed in drypoint, aquatint, etching and lithography. Inspired by the revolutionary iconographies of the Norwegian master, the exhibition investigates the work of this protagonist of Nordic Expressionism, the creator of iconic masterpieces in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The overwhelming intensity of forms and colours in Munch’s art reverberates all through the 20th century. This appears not just in the Scandinavian and German art added to the collections of Ca’ Pesaro through acquisitions by the Municipality of Venice during the editions of the Biennale, but also in the great season of the Weimar Republic between the wars.

The lesson of German and Nordic Expressionism appears in works at Ca’ Pesaro, such as those by Ugo Valeri, the masks of the Belgian James Ensor, and the scathing prints by Max Beckmann, of which Ca’ Pesaro preserves an outstanding core of 29 graphic works, part of the donation made by Paul Prast in 2022. Beckmann’s merciless depictions of human nature, brutal and ferocious, are flanked by the works of other masters such as Otto Dix, Christian Rohlfs, or even the Italian Alberto Martini, whose engravings probe human forms and figures.

Munch’s expressionist scream was perpetuated through the 20th century by the denunciatory works of Renato Guttuso and in the horrors of war depicted by the sensibility of various artists, who have brought modernity down to the present. Recent conflicts are depicted in Marina Abramovič and Shirin Neshat’s monumental figures and Mike Nelson and Brad Kahlhamer’s skulls, works donated in December 2022 by Gemma De Angelis Testa to the Municipality of Venice for Ca’ Pesaro.

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