www.mart.trento.it/magnificentobsession
 
Mart Rovereto, 26th October 2012 - 6th October 2013
 
The Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto is to celebrate its tenth anniversary through an exhibition that redraws the relationship between its collections and the public, reflects about its heritage and embarks on a new way of observing the latter.
 
The Mart’s rich collections have often been presented in thematic exhibitions, with a focus on a particular circumscribed group. The anniversary exhibition instead aims to construct a more extensive overview of the collection. About 1200 works will enable the public to explore the Mart’s holdings in their integrity and variety, offering an experience that will have a fresh and unexpectedly powerful impact on visitors.
Frequently the taste directed by the obsessions typical of every collector has directed the creation and development of many of the collections donated or loaned to the Mart.
This is the starting point for “The magnificent obsession”, an exhibition that will last almost an entire year, from 26th October, 2012, to 6th October, 2013, and will fill the whole of the Mart’s second floor. An unprecedented project for the Mart, this exhibition has been defined with an accumulation of adjectives by its director, Cristiana Collu: “Self-taught, water-diviner, auto-da-fé of works. Victim or protagonist, recomposed collection, disturbing and provocative, maniacal and fetishist. Obscure object of desire. Secret, sharing, intoxication, celebration. Giddiness of blending”.
In organising “The magnificent obsession”, the Mart has made use of all its in-house skills, in what has been a real team effort. The curators and conservators involved are Nicoletta Boschiero with Veronica Caciolli, Margherita de Pilati, Duccio Dogheria, Daniela Ferrari, Mariarosa Mariech, Paola Pettenella, Alessandra Tiddia, Denis Viva and Federico Zanoner.
“The magnificent obsession” will offer a vision that is radically free of any temporal dimension; the works will be placed alongside each other in line with a criterion that might be defined a “preview of the present” or “archaeology of the future”. The layout of the exhibition is indeed chronological in scope, but in reality proceeds in major thematic shifts. The works are presented without any visual hierarchy, mixing the collections and highlighting the differences between categories. In a certain sense, it will constitute a re-evocation of the spirit of the 19th-century salons, exhibitions that represented a different way of looking at works of art. “The magnificent obsession” will offer a sensitivity close to the criteria of collecting and the visual conditions of reality, rather than the presumed neutrality and ascetic nature of modern and contemporary exhibition spaces. At the same time, the exhibition can be read as an account of the activities concerning the collections: conservation, restoration, institutional relations and study. These are fundamental and constantly evolving aspects in the life of a museum, which this exhibition will bring to the surface.
It is worth stressing one theme that cuts through the whole exhibition: that of a striving for the identity of the museum itself, which is marked by its own dynamism: starting with the works of Andrea Malfatti and running through the 20th century to arrive at Richard Long’s “Trento Ellipse”, made with porphyry from the Trentino.
For the same reason, “The magnificent obsession” houses works planned and made by contemporary artists who appear, offering their own interpretation of the historic succession of works: from the residence of Paco Cao, to special guests Emilio Isgrò, Liliana Moro, Christian Fogarolli and Paolo Meoni.
 
THE EXHIBITION LAYOUT
 
“The magnificent obsession” begins with a room reconstructing the studio of Andrea Malfatti, a sculptor from the Trentino: this is his gipsoteca or plaster cast gallery, the first real nucleus of a collection donated by the artist to the city of Trento in 1912. A nude holds a pose in the studio, while the following rooms introduce the theme of the portrait in painting which, with the room dedicated to graphic art, constitutes an important nucleus of the works conserved in the museum.
The developments of the major art movements are represented through both works and documents: Futurism, for instance, is evoked in its most genuine and revolutionary form, with the 1909 manifesto by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti on display and evoking the setting invented by Fortunato Depero for the International exhibition of modern decorative and industrial arts in Paris in 1925.
The history of Futurism runs in parallel to that of the First World War; a video by Gianikian and Lucchi lays bare the tragedy of the conflict.
 
The 1930s were a key decade for the development of Italian art in the last century. The Mart holds the legacy of a form of collecting founded in those years, which invested in such artists as Giorgio Morandi, Filippo de Pisis and Massimo Campigli, in a close relationship with the market, and in particular with Milanese galleries like the Pesaro or Milione.
A section dedicated to Mario Sironi documents the civil intentions and political and cultural needs of Italy at the time, and the decoration produced for public buildings. These developments were theorised in 1933 in the “Manifesto of mural painting”. This part of the exhibition shows how architecture took on a dominant position in the 1930s, one that was crucial in relation to the other arts: it became the interpreter of the needs for a modernisation that was closely associated with the idea of a “new society”. The wealth of supporting documentation all comes from the holdings of the Mart’s 20th-century Archive, including the collections of Angiolo Mazzoni and of Figini and Pollini. The presence of the Sandretti 20th-century Russian art collection is represented by posters revealing the “encyclopaedic” manner of collecting typical of the 1970s.
After the Second World War, there was a strong shift towards figurative art – which attributed painting a function that was to be highly representative of reality – but also an opposing abstract trend. The dialectic between Renato Guttuso and Emilio Vedova, highlighted in the exhibition by being hung opposite each other, astonishes for the spectacular breadth of contrast between these two trends, so different yet constituting elements of the same ideology.
The language of American art in those same years instead saw the combination of figurative art and pictorial abstraction. Pop Art and Minimalism proved to be the common denominator in the US domination of the art scene of these years. The American myth emerged even more strongly in cinema, and the “Hollywood on the Tiber” section evokes Fellini’s dolce vita with Alcide Ticò’s busts dedicated to movie stars and works of the Roman school of Piazza del Popolo, from Mimmo Rotella to Mario Schifano and Tano Festa.
 
The ‘nuclear’ Milanese groups, the art of Lucio Fontana and other events influencing both the Informal and the later Kinetic Art correspond to a vision of a modernity marked by a greater sense of exploration but also more apocalyptic and mechanical. The painted surface of the 1960s was often tackled in Italy and elsewhere as a printed page, but giving rise to two parallel developments: that of abstract-modernist formalism – in which the painting declares its two-dimensionality – or the decision to use graphic marks, prints, stencils and other markers.
 
A certain form of abstraction, present in Italian art since the end of the last war, developed a strong preference for modular geometry, contrasting with verbal and visual poetry. This current, sound-based poetry and mail art, are well-represented in the Counterculture section by collections including archival documents and artist’s books alongside the artworks themselves.
 
The pictorial figuration and Transavanguardia of the 1980s and 1990s are shown in relation to the production of such graphic artists as Andrea Pazienza and Lorenzo Mattotti, and to cartoons like Cannibale, RankXerox and Frigidaire, created in Bologna in those same years. An expressive, irreverent form of figurative art blending youth culture and punk influences.
 
To close, the “Worlds and depictions” room shows some works rotating around the concepts of identity and multi-culturalism, highlighting the social differences characterising our planet. The room also offers a series of ‘trans-temporal’ perspectives and points of view, from “Grassello” by Joseph Beuys, one of the first artists to have sought to lessen the gap between art and responsible existence, to the famous photographs of Irving Penn showing inhabitants of Cuzco, and an installation by Christian Boltanski about a group of Jewish schoolchildren in the 1930s, many of whom probably died during the following decade.
This overview closes with a historic work in terms of the subject and involvement of Afghan embroiderers: Alighiero Boetti’s “Mappa”.
The depiction of the landscape aims to give an extended sense of time and space: whether horizon or layer, space and time always indicate the persistence and atavistic existence of nature despite man. The final room in the exhibition, entitled, “Second nature”, symbolically links art, environments and the museum by presenting “Trento Ellipse”, the work created in 2000 by Richard Long for the Mart using a local porphyry.