A major exhibition on Vasily Kandinsky is coming to Rovigo. The previews

From February 26 to June 26, 2022, Palazzo Roverella in Rovigo will host a major retrospective on Vasily Kandinsky, curated by Paolo Bolpagni and Evgenia Petrova, which aims to offer the public an in-depth look at the great Russian abstractionist’s research. The exhibition is an initiative of the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Padova e Rovigo, with the collaboration of local institutions.

“After a number of exhibitions aimed at highlighting individual aspects of Kandinsky, the goal of this project is to help grasp the unified arc of the artist’s path,” the curators anticipate. This will be done “by identifying the constants that, from the early twentieth century until the end, innervate his highly personal way of painting: the search for an inner authenticity, the desire to create a new and free visual world, the reference to music, spiritualistic irrationalism and the link with Russian folk art and especially with the creative expressions of the peoples of Siberia, whose traces act as a common thread. The musical and ethnographic components reveal a common spiritualistic root.”

The exhibition will trace the gradual transition from figuration to abstraction, which stands out as the keystone of one of the most radical revolutions in painting in the first half of the 20th century. Kandinsky’s contribution to the creation of an expressive form of painting based on new assumptions is enormous, but, the curators point out, “despite the great historical-critical work that, even in recent decades, many scholars have done, there remains something enigmatic in the analysis of his path. Numerous were the matrices from which sprang, with slow gradualness, that artistic language that shocked the twentieth century: from the very strong power of suggestion exerted on Kandinsky by music, to the knowledge of the peasant folk culture of deep Russia; of the houses, furniture and colorful costumes with which he came into contact during an expedition to the territory of Vologda in Siberia.”

The aim of the exhibition will also be to highlight how Kandinsky’s fascination also lies in his impregnability, in escaping entirely rational explanations. And the exhibition designed for the Roverella aims precisely to analyze the constant change and evolution of his evocative and visionary art, first and foremost in the fundamental shift from figuration to abstractionism, in the dialectic between expressive freedom and ordering principles. The intention of the curators is to analyze the Kandinsky story with an original slant, with an exhibition that begins with the artist’s beginnings, in Munich, and then delves into his landing in Murnau and the discovery of the “spiritual in art,” leading then to the admirable moment of the “Blue Rider” and the conquest of abstractionism (1911-1914). Then the return to Russia (1914-1921) and the experience at the Bauhaus (1922-1933), until the last years in the land of France. That is, a punctual itinerary that gets to the heart of all the creative moments of Kandinsky’s story, documenting it in the exhibition through a sequence of high quality works that have hardly been seen in an Italian exhibition on him. Thus in Rovigo one will see works granted by Russian museums, first of all, but also by numerous European institutions.

Image: Vasily Kandinsky, Der See (1910; Moscow, Tret’jakov Gallery)

A major exhibition on Vasily Kandinsky is coming to Rovigo. The previews

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