Cookie Consent by Free Privacy Policy website Triennale di Milano hosts FRANCESCO SOMAINI Sculptor for the city. New York 1967-1976
  • Home
  • Triennale di Milano hosts FRANCESCO SOMAINI Sculptor for the city. New York 1967-1976
logo culturemarketing
art&culture
december 19, 2016 - Triennale

Triennale di Milano hosts FRANCESCO SOMAINI Sculptor for the city. New York 1967-1976

The exhibition recalls an important creative season of the great italian sculptor, focusing on the artist's view on the relationship between sculpture and architecture in modern metropolis

Triennale di Milano hosts an exhibition that recalls an important creative season of the sculptor Francesco Somaini (1926-2005), former star of Concretism and European informal art, focusing on his activity in the USA.
The exhibition analyzes through 16 sculptures, 15 drawings and 14 photomontages, coming from the Francesco Somaini Archive and Italian private collections, the artist's view on the relationship between sculpture and architecture in modern metropolis. Somaini is a pioneer in this field of research in Italy and Europe both theoretically and practically. Following his first travels to New York City in the early sixties, the artist develops his research aimed at overcoming the previous positions of "integration of the arts".
Somaini's vision is, indeed, inspired by the skyline of New York, taken as a symbol of modernity. The city is studied and photographed during a series of trips made from 1960 to 1972. This extraordinary creative decade in the career of the sculptor culminates in 1970 with the projects of large-scale monumental sculptures realized for the cities of Baltimore, Atlanta and Rochester.
The artist's relationship with New York began in 1960 with his first personal exhibition in the United States at the Italian Cultural Institute of New York. During his stay, he had the opportunity to meet famous critics and important art collectors: the architect Philip Johnson, the Rockefeller family, Lydia Winston Malbin, Alan and Janet Wurzburger, Joseph Hirshhorn, Seimour H. Knox II and many others.
Somaini develops his ideas about the relationship between sculpture and architecture in a series of drawings, published in the book Urgency in the city, wrote by the sculptor himself and Enrico Crispolti (Mazzotta, 1972). In the mid-seventies, he realizes the series of sculptures Carnificazioni di un'architettura, as Sphinx of Manhattan of 1974 and Colossus of New York of 1976.
These sculptures, whose titles recall mytological figures, are also intended to be enigmatic building models.
Giulio Carlo Argan wrote: "Somaini has attentively studied the problem, which involves his own responsibility as an artist; and he has reached the conclusion that the city as an historical and social institution is not dead yet. The city has retained an historical dimension; the artists’ intervention and their efforts in trying to find a solution are not only possible, but are necessary and urgent (...). Somaini’s assumption is methodological and procedural: the artist’s task, today, is not to construct or reconstruct the city, but rather to interpret the city and make it meaningful. "
Somaini's sculptures are Archisculture which, in the second half of the seventies, became protagonists of a series of utopian photomontages, aimed at shaking emotionally the viewer with an even “more incisive and striking provocative impact" - recalls Bruno Zevi.
The exhibition catalog is published by Skira, with texts by Francesco Somaini, Enrico Crispolti, Fulvio Irace, Giulio Carlo Argan, Luisa Somaini, Beatrice Borromeo Aiazzi, Fabio G. Porta Trezzi.


FRANCESCO SOMAINI
Sculptor for the city
New York 1967-1976
Triennale di Milano
13 January – 5 February 2017
Free entrance

La Triennale di Milano
Viale Alemagna 6
20121 Milano
T. +39 02 724341
www.triennale.org

Read more

- Photogallery (33)
photos
- Documents (1)
text

download-icon press release

2MB

language switch Italian

Hashtag
#show #culturemarketing #photography #exibition #sculpture #architecture

© Copyright 2024