Cookie Consent by Free Privacy Policy website Two major exhibitions in parallel at the Museo MAN in Nuoro Sonia Leimer. Via San Gennaro curated by Luigi Fassi and Vittorio Accornero – Edina Altara. Family group with images curated by Luca Scarlini - Saturday 10 July 2021 – Sunday 23 January 2022
july 09, 2021 - Museo Man Nuoro

Two major exhibitions in parallel at the Museo MAN in Nuoro Sonia Leimer. Via San Gennaro curated by Luigi Fassi and Vittorio Accornero – Edina Altara. Family group with images curated by Luca Scarlini - Saturday 10 July 2021 – Sunday 23 January 2022

From Saturday 10 July 2021 to Sunday 23 January 2022, the MAN Museo dArte Provincia di #nuoro is presenting two major exhibitions in parallel: Via San Gennaro, a solo show featuring the work of Sonia Leimer (Merano, 1977), curated by Luigi Fassi and dedicated to the project that won the Italian Council award in 2018, and Vittorio Accornero Edina Altara. Family group with images, the first retrospective devoted entirely to the work and lives of Vittorio Accornero de Testa (Casale Monferrato, 1896 Milan, 1982) and Edina Altara (Sassari, 1898 Lanusei, 1983), curated by Luca Scarlini.

The Via San Gennaro project was the winner of the fourth Italian Council competition (2018), an event set up by the Italian Ministry of Culture’s General Office for Contemporary Art and Architecture and Urban Outskirts (DGAAP) to promote contemporary Italian art around the world, funding works by some of Italy’s leading artists in strategic collaboration with Italian and international museum institutions. The MAN helped provide support for Sonia Leimer in partnership with the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York one of the best established innovative #contemporaryart incubators on a global level where the project was presented for the first time from September 2019 to January 2020, curated by Kari Conte and Luigi Fassi.

Sonia Leimer was born in Merano in 1977 and has lived in Vienna for many years now. Her work has always explored social and anthropological issues, focusing on the investigation of metropolitan spaces, social metamorphoses and urban transformations. The analysis of major cities, observed as infrastructures with a high population density, is a continuous feature in her artistic research.

Via San Gennaro is the outcome of an intensive artist residency lasting several months in New York. During her stay, Sonia Leimer researched Italian memories of Little Italy in Manhattan, the New York neighbourhood that symbolizes the history of Italian migration to the United States, especially from the southern and Mediterranean regions. It has been a crossroads of individual and collective destinies from the twentieth century onwards.

Comprising sculptures, videos and drawings, the exhibition provides recognition of a combination of traces, phenomena and urban sediments capable of telling the story of Little Italy’s transformations together with the relentless disappearance of Italian memories. The exhibition takes its title from the celebration of the Feast of San Gennaro, which has taken place every September in Little Italy since 1924.

The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive catalogue published with ISCP and Mousse Publishing and featuring critical essays by Alessandra Cianchetta, Kari Conte and Luigi Fassi.

Developed by the MAN thanks to the support of the Italian Council project, Via San Gennaro carries forward two fundamental guidelines underpinning the museums current programme maintains Luigi Fassi, director of the MAN and exhibition curator such as the desire to continue commissioning new works by contemporary artists, reinforcing the MANs role as a patron of the arts, together with the objective of exploring the Mediterranean territory and its relationship with the global world. Thanks to the capacity of the artists work to connect the Atlantic world with the Italian shores of the Mediterranean, Leimers research into memories of Italian migration to the Little Italy neighbourhood has proved to be an invaluable artistic contribution to the activity carried out by the MAN during this phase.

Vittorio Accornero Edina Altara. Family group with images, the exhibition curated by Luca Scarlini and devoted to Vittorio Accornero de Testa (Casale Monferrato, 1896 Milan, 1982) and Edina Altara (Sassari, 1898 Lanusei, 1983) seeks to draw attention to the work of two artists and illustrators, exploring their complex personal and creative affairs that united them from their very first individual works in the 1920s all the way through to the 1980s.

Vittorio Accornero de Testa and Edina Altara met in Casale Monferrato in Piedmont and their professional lives became intertwined on the pages of the wonderful Il giornalino della domenica, a Florentine creation by Vamba, author of the Giornalino di Gian Burrasca, which featured the very best Italian illustration and literature of the time, with authors such as Piero Calamandrei, Luigi Capuana and Grazia Deledda. Accornero made his debut on these pages in 1919, followed by Altara in 1920, paying tribute to Sardinia’s iconographic tradition with La leggenda del golfo degli Aranci.

Gifted illustrators of books for children and adults alike, and among the pioneers of this activity in Italy, the pair worked with great energy and enthusiasm in the Art Deco period, extending their work to the world of the applied arts as a whole.

The exhibition at the #museoman makes it possible to paint a detailed picture of the duo and their diverse activity thanks to loans from the extensive collection of Federico Spano, founder of the Archivio Accornero-Altara in Sassari, and from numerous Italian public collections: the Fondazione Tancredi di Barolo in Turin, the collections of the Palazzo del Quirinale in Rome, the Archivio del Teatro alla Scala in Milan and the Museo del Cinema in Turin.

On this occasion, with the important contribution of a group of set designers working with the Teatro di Sardegna, namely Loïc Hamelin, Sabrina Cuccu and Sergio Mancosu, the MAN is being transformed into a book of fairy tales, a kaleidoscope of elegant twentieth-century images, thereby staging the fairy story of two artists poised between Sardinia, continental Italy and the world.

The exhibition tells the story of Edina and Ninon, divided into different chapters in the various rooms making up the exhibition, comprising graphics (as in the case of the images for the transatlantic liner Rex, and the creation of designer objects and architecture), Altaras mirrors and Accorneros neo-Rococo architectural revisitations in Piedmont.

Vittorio Accornero and Edina Altara played a very considerable role in the applied arts from the 1920s to the 1970s. Edina Altara developed her own very specific line of research, which took her from illustration to interiors over the years. Vittorio Accornero transferred the fairy-tale world of his illustrations to Gucci fashion, creating scarves that met with widespread success. Their creativity as a couple was as rich as it was unexplored in Italian twentieth-century art,notes the curator Luca Scarlini.

The exhibition is accompanied by an important catalogue published by the MAN with Silvana Editoriale, containing critical essays by Luigi Fassi, Luca Scarlini, Pompeo Vagliani, Silvia Mira, Lauretta Colonnelli, Aurora Fiorentini, Giorgia Toso and Federico Spano.