At the MIC in Faenza, an exhibition on the terracottas of Germano Sartelli

From May 18 to Aug. 17, 2025, the MIC - Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche di Faenza will host Alfabeti di terracotta, an exhibition dedicated to the terracotta production of artist Germano Sartelli (Imola, 1925 - Imola, 2014), set up in the Project Room spaces. The opening is set for Friday, May 16 at 6 p.m., with free admission and a presentation by art historian and critic Claudio Spadoni. Diego Galizzi, director of the San Domenico Museum in Imola, and Marzia Sartelli, representing the Sartelli Archive, will also speak. The Faenza exhibition is part of the program of events organized on the occasion of the centenary of the artist’s birth and is closely related to the anthological exhibition currently underway at the Museo di San Domenico in Imola, curated by Spadoni himself and open to the public until July 13, 2025.

The Imola exhibition traces Sartelli’s entire creative arc, from his early experiments with collage to the works on paper created in his last years of activity, while the Faenza appointment focuses on a single nucleus of works: the terracotta sculptures. Alfabeti di terra is the result of a collaboration between MIC Faenza and the Archivio Sartelli, which selected together with the museum a group of works representative of the artist’s interest in ceramic material. The terracottas, like Sartelli’s other works, are in fact born out of a concern for poor, raw, salvaged materials, often linked to the natural environment: leaves, branches, earth, but also abandoned objects such as rusted metal sheets, broken glass, cigarette butts, gauze and papers.

The exhibition is also ideally connected to the 2024 opening of the Laboratorio Sartelli House Museum in the Imola hills, the artist’s home and studio now transformed into a permanent exhibition space. The venue was recently included in the list of “Homes and studios of the illustrious people of Emilia-Romagna,” strengthening the artist’s bond with the territory and the regional cultural community. A secluded but far from marginal figure in the Italian art scene of the second half of the 20th century, Germano Sartelli developed a coherent and original research, far from fashions and based on a direct relationship with matter.

The artist often used unconventional techniques and materials, experimenting since the 1950s with an informal language that eschewed any decorative intent to focus rather on signs, traces and minimal presences. His interest in the earth and objects collected from his surroundings responded to an existential attitude, which Andrea Emiliani, among the first scholars to deal with Sartelli, described affectionately as a “provincial theater troubadour.” According to Emiliani, Sartelli approached the things of the world with the gaze of a diviner, grasping what is often invisible or ignored, and then regenerating it within works that become symbols of new possibilities. Another important aspect of the artist’s journey concerns the socio-health field. Beginning in the 1960s, Sartelli collaborated for more than 30 years with the Imola Psychiatric Hospital, where he founded a painting atelier that served as a creative space open to inpatients, anticipating art therapy experiences that are widely recognized today. Institutional recognition of Sartelli’s art came as early as the 1960s, with the 1962 award of the Ministry of Education’s prize for sculpture and, two years later, an invitation to the XXXII Venice Biennale.

At the MIC in Faenza, an exhibition on the terracottas of Germano Sartelli

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