Armando Testa's works on display at Ca' Pesaro in Venice

The Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna Ca’ Pesaro in Venice inaugurates the new 2024 exhibition season with a major exhibition visitable from April 20 to September 15, 2024, dedicated to Armando Testa (Turin, 1917 - 1992). Already present since December 2022 in the Venetian civic collections with 17 works, the creative genius from Piedmont will be the focus of a monographic exhibition curated by Gemma de Angelis Testa, Tim Marlow and Elisabetta Barisoni. The exhibition aims to reconstruct the artistic path of a protagonist of contemporary visual culture, creator of famous icons that have entered our collective imagination for years. His masterpieces are the offspring of a plurality of expressive languages, experimented over the course of his more than 30-year career, whose modernity is today a source of inspiration for contemporary artists and which has led aesthetics scholar Gillo Dorfles to call him a “global visualizer.”

Armando Testa’s first competition, won at the age of 20 for ICI (Industria Colori Inchiostri) in 1937, was flanked by the research he carried out in the immediate postwar period for major companies such as Martini & Rossi, Carpano, Borsalino and Pirelli, from which some of his most ingenious and iconic inventions would spring. And again, the advertisements, promotional campaigns and logos for Lavazza, Sasso, Carpano, Simmenthal and Lines, among others, which have accompanied several generations of viewers, users, artists and creatives, will be enriched by Testa’s suggestions for national public occasions, such as the 1960 Rome Olympics, for which he created the official poster, winning a competition marked by articulate events. The 1950s and 1960s saw the birth of images and animations for television, with characters, sounds and gestures that have remained in the history of advertising and international culture: from the digestive Antonetto (1960) to the famous red sphere suspended above the half sphere of Punt e Mes, which in Piedmontese dialect means “a point and a half” (1960); from Caballero and Carmencita for coffee Paulista by Lavazza (1965) to the imaginative inhabitants of planet Papalla for Philco televisions (1966); from Pippo, the blue hippo of Lines diapers (1966-1967), to advertisements for Sasso oil (1968) and Peroni beer (1968).

The exhibition will explore the theme of food in its various facets, often with an eclectic and ironic touch, alongside initiatives related to social problems and cultural dissemination, to which Armando Testa has dedicated his efforts, such as campaigns for Amnesty International, the divorce referendum and the fight against poverty and world hunger. Along with these productions, Testa’s research on ever-present themes such as the human figure, geometries, contrasts between positive and negative, and on hands and fingers, primary instruments of perception of the world, will be explored. The exhibition at the International Gallery of Modern Art will offer viewers an opportunity to review a significant part of their own history and new generations to discover the creative genius of the recent past. The aim is not only to present the Armando Testa already known, but to offer an overview of his artistic contribution, with a focus on his qualities and insights as a painter, sculptor, draughtsman and creator of extraordinary suggestions encapsulated in a surprising synthesis.

Armando Testa's works on display at Ca' Pesaro in Venice

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