Exhibitions in Ferrara, from the Ferrara Renaissance to Guido Harari

Ferrara reminds that two exhibitions at the Estense Castle are still open to the public until June 4, 2023. Carlo Guarienti. The Reality of the Dream and the IX VAF Foundation Prize. The first, the brainchild of Vittorio Sgarbi and organized by Fondazione Ferrara Arte and Servizio Musei d’Arte of the Municipality of Ferrara, with the patronage of the Emilia-Romagna Region, presents more than one hundred works, including paintings and sculptures, through which the broad and articulated path of the artist, among the protagonists of the national and European art scene for more than half a century, marked by a constant, as much as coherent, process of metamorphosis, is investigated. Tempted by countless stimuli, Guarienti points in his work in the direction of a realism based on thought, on abstract concepts that translate into images, more or less enigmatic, suspended between dream and reality. As Vittorio Sgarbi pointed out, in Carlo Guarienti’s works “we find what metaphysical painting had wanted to represent, from its beginnings, with de Chirico’s research: an essential dimension, totally purified, of pure thought, which comes to distill and thus to distance emotionality. Purely mental painting.”

The Premio Fondazione VAF, established by the German foundation of the same name to support Italian contemporary art, especially the artistic and creative potential of artists under 40, and to boost cultural exchange between Italy and Germany, now in its ninth edition, features the works of nine protagonists of the contemporary scene in the exhibition: Luca Azzurro, Renata and Cristina Cosi, Silvia Inselvini, KEM collective, L’orMa (Lorenzo Mariani, winner of this edition for his reinterpretation of sculpture materials with intentions of ironic lightness), Enrico Minguzzi (who was was awarded the third prize for the research on the pictorial and sign texture of the composition), Sebastiano Raimondo, Dario Tironi, Valeria Vaccaro (who was awarded the second prize for the ability of metamorphosis of plastic materials). A special mention was given to the KEM collective for its imprinted research in the field of new media art. Also on display are some works by Paolo Baratella, a recently deceased artist, who was given a lifetime achievement award.

Both exhibitions can be visited daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. For more info visit the Castello Estense website.

Also open to the public until June 19, 2023 at Palazzo dei Diamanti is the major exhibition Renaissance in Ferrara. Ercole de’ Roberti and Lorenzo Costa, curated by Vittorio Sgarbi and Michele Danieli, is organized by Fondazione Ferrara Arte and Servizio Musei d’Arte of the Municipality of Ferrara, in collaboration with Direzione Generale Musei and Direzione Generale Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio of the Ministry of Culture and under the patronage of the Ministry of Culture and the Emilia-Romagna Region and is supported by Versalis Spa and BPER Banca. Through more than one hundred works from museums and collections around the world, the exhibition is a unique opportunity to discover (or rediscover) the richness of the Ferrarese Renaissance, particularly through the art of two great Ferrarese painters and the artists who were their contemporaries, such as Mantegna, Cosmè Tura, Niccolò dell’Arca, and Marco Zoppo, who provide the starting point, while Antonio da Crevalcore, Guido Mazzoni, Boccaccio Boccaccino, Francesco Francia, and Perugino offer a bank of dialogue along the exhibition route.

You can read our reviewhere .

The exhibition is open daily from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. For info: www.palazzodiamanti.it

On the other hand, the exhibition Art and Literature in the Name of Roberto Longhi is running until June 24, 2023 at the Ariostea Library. Bassani, Pasolini, Testori, from an idea of Vittorio Sgarbi, curated by Francesca Bini and Alessandro Gnocchi, and organized Fondazione Ferrara Arte and Servizio Musei d’Arte in collaboration with Servizio Biblioteche e Archivi del Comune di Ferrara. The result of painstaking archival research, letters, manuscripts, photographs, drawings and period films bear witness to the dense exchange between some of the protagonists of twentieth-century Italian cultural life, laying the groundwork for future research. Divided into ten thematic sections that aim to define the variety of connections between Longhi and his direct (Arcangeli, Pasolini, Bassani) and indirect (Testori) pupils, the exhibition includes a general presentation of the profile of the master and his pupils, whose points of contact with Longhi’s magisterium are considered, as well as their mutual biographical and intellectual relationships. Emphasis is given to insights into issues of social relevance, such as the censorship to which Pasolini, Testori and indirectly Bassani were subjected, and to focuses of an artistic nature, such as that on Francis Bacon, whose knowledge spread in the early 1960s, after the monographic exhibition in Turin (1962), and with whom Longhi’s three pupils dealt in different ways. It can also be seen how Bassani and Pasolini reworked Longhi’s influence by reusing the medium of the artistic image in original ways, respectively through the recovery of paintings that the former chose to place on the covers of the first editions of his novels and through the numerous pictorial references in the latter’s film production.

The exhibition, accompanied by a catalog with essays by Vittorio Sgarbi, president of the Ferrara Arte Foundation, Francesca Bini (scholar of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics of the Visual Arts), Alessandro Gnocchi (Editor-in-chief of “Il Giornale”) and Mirna Bonazza (Head of U.O. Libraries of the Municipality of Ferrara), explores the biographical relationships and cultural exchanges between the three great authors of Italian literature with the master Roberto Longhi, whose role as a mentor is emphasized.

The exhibition can be visited Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Anticipations of upcoming scheduled reviews.

From July 8 to December 26, 2023, the Castello Estense will host the exhibition Arrigo Minerbi, between Art Nouveau and Classicism. Organized by the Ferrara Arte Foundation and the Ferrara Gallerie d’Arte Moderna Contemporanea, the exhibition is part of the project to study and promote Ferrara’s artistic personalities of the 19th and 20th centuries launched in the halls of the Castello Estense with the monographic exhibitions Tra simbolismo e futurismo. Gaetano Previati, (2020) and Giovanni Battista Crema. Beyond Pointillism (2021), and will run in parallel with the exhibition dedicated to Achille Funi scheduled at Palazzo dei Diamanti next fall.

The exhibition project will trace for the first time the entire artistic parabola of the still little-known Ferrarese sculptor Arrigo Minerbi, with the intention of relocating him within the Italian artistic context of the early 20th century. Minerbi’s work testifies to an original temperament but perfectly rooted in the artistic debate that accompanied the transition between the Liberty of the early 20th century and the Novecentismo that matured after World War I, up to the dominant classicism of the 1930s. This parabola will be evoked through a rich selection of sculptures by the Ferrara artist, which will be juxtaposed with pictorial and plastic works by modern Italian masters, between symbolism, magic realism and classicism (such as Gaetano Previati, Leonardo Bistolfi, Adolfo Wildt, Galileo Chini, Ercole Drei, Felice Casorati, Ubaldo Oppi, Mario Sironi, Antonio Maraini, and Achille Funi). Among the goals of the exhibition, is also the enhancement of one of the important nuclei of the heritage of the Ferrara Galleries of Modern and Contemporary Art: in fact, the exhibition will give the public the opportunity to admire the most significant testimonies of the Minerbi fund: a selection of more than forty sculptures, some never exhibited so far, among the two hundred kept in the museum’s collections, some of which were donated to the city by the artist himself in 1953. A major restoration campaign has been launched in anticipation of the exhibition.

From July 16 to October 1, 2023, Palazzo dei Diamanti will instead host a major anthological exhibition dedicated to Guido Harari. Organized with Rjma Progetti Culturali and Wall Of Sound Gallery, the Ferrara Arte Foundation and the Art Museum Service of the Municipality of Ferrara present an evocative exhibition with more than three hundred photographs, original installations and films, projections and musical incursions, a photographic set and meetings with the author. Guido Harari. Encounters. 50 years of photographs and stories, this is the title of the exhibition, will retrace all the stages of Guido Harari’s eclectic career: from his beginnings in the music field as a photographer and journalist, to the numerous record covers for artists such as Fabrizio De André, Bob Dylan, Vasco Rossi, Kate Bush, Paolo Conte, Lou Reed, and Frank Zappa, to the affirmation of a work that over time has bounced from one genre to another (publishing, advertising, fashion, reportage), always privileging portraiture as an intimate account of encounters with the major personalities of his time.

Exhibitions in Ferrara, from the Ferrara Renaissance to Guido Harari

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