From Oct. 14 to Dec. 19, 2025, Mazzoleni London Gallery will host Albisola: A Season of Artists, an exhibition that reconstructs the Ligurian town’s creative season and the relationships that, over time, have made it an international crossroads of artistic experiments. The initiative is part of the journey leading up to the gallery’s 40th anniversary, scheduled for 2026, and also reflects the personal history of the Mazzoleni family, which has been linked to Albisola, in the province of Savona, since the 1960s.
Albisola, between the 1920s and 1970s, established itself as a meeting point for Italian and foreign artists, poets, critics and collectors. Its geographical location, the quality of local clay and a centuries-old ceramic tradition helped make it a fertile context for the avant-garde. In the 1930s Futurism, thanks mainly to Tullio d’Albisola and his collaborations with modernist artists and designers, transformed the city into a kind of “free republic of the arts.” In the postwar period it was Lucio Fontana, Asger Jorn, Emilio Scanavino, Enrico Baj, Wifredo Lam and Piero Manzoni who continued that line of research, renewing the dialogue between art and craft. A crucial moment was the International Meeting of Ceramics organized by Jorn in 1954 at the Mazzotti factory. The event initiated what Lou Laurin called “Albisolamania,” a phenomenon that drew artists from different countries and consolidated the town’s role as a center of creative exchange. From that period emerged a cultural fabric capable of bringing together heterogeneous experiences, blending languages and traditions.
The Mazzoleni family’s connection with Albisola dates back to the late 1960s, when Giovanni and Anna Pia first visited the town attracted by its cultural vitality and the Lungomare degli Artisti, a mosaic pathway created by leading figures in Italian and international art. In that context a friendship was born with Wifredo Lam, who had already been in Albisola since the 1950s. His studio in the hills, characterized by the presence of African objects, deeply affected Luigi Mazzoleni, then a child. Those encounters fueled the family’s passion for collecting and led, in 1978, to the organization of Lam’s solo show at Galleria Gissi in Turin, one of the first collaborations with the Mazzolenis, who later took over the direction of the space under the name Nuova Gissi.
The London exhibition thus re-presents works by artists who marked that season, including Baj, Capogrossi, Crippa, Fontana, Jorn, Lam, Manzoni and Scanavino. The selected works highlight the intercultural dialogue that developed in Albisola after World War II. Among the pieces on display are Lam’s Femme Cheval (1966), with its references to Afro-Cuban mythology, Fontana’s Ceramic Spatial Concepts and Baj’s satirical collages. The variety of works in the exhibition testifies to the plurality of research that found common ground in Albisola, in an interweaving of visual arts, plastic experimentation and technical innovation.
Accompanying the exhibition is a catalog with a critical essay by Luca Bochicchio, art historian, curator and lecturer at the University of Verona, as well as founder of MuDA - Museo Diffuso Albisola, which includes the Casa Museo Jorn. Bochicchio has devoted more than a decade of research to the area’s artistic legacy and interprets the exhibition as one more piece in the reconstruction of Albisola’s role in contemporary art.
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| Albisola and the legacy of great artists: Mazzoleni brings Liguria to London exhibition |
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