From Casorati to Carrà, magic realism is on display at the Mart

From December 3, 2017 to April 2, 2018, the Mart in Rovereto is the scene of a major international exhibition dedicated to magic realism and curated by Gabriella Belli and Valerio Terraroli: it is Magic Realism. Enchantment in Italian Painting of the 1920s and 1930s, which will then move from the Mart to the Ateneum Art Museum in Helsinki (from May 1 to August 19) and then make its final stop at the Folkwang Museum in Essen (from September 27, 2018 to January 13, 2019), all under the banner of the international relations with important European partners that the Mart usually entertains.

The exhibition, which continues the reflections begun in 2016 with The Painters of Light. From Divisionism to Futurism and continued in 2017 with An Eternal Beauty, displays more than 70 works by all those artists who in the early postwar period, wanting to end the experience of the historical avant-gardes, subjected art to a decisive recovery of tradition between the 1920s and 1930s: “the anxiety of cubisms and fauvisms, futurisms and expressionisms,” Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco wrote in an essay in the 1980s, “has turned into an effective existential anguish. Now it is a matter of digging in the rubble, stopping for a moment, searching for some point of reference.” The exhibition aims to document this “existential angst,” this restlessness that produced works with surreal atmospheres but executed with precision by realist painters (hence the expression magic realism, coined in 1925 by critic Franz Roh).

“Reality,” we read in the presentation, “is in fact the starting point of an ideal metamorphosis that passes through imagination and wonder, which is not limited to mere representation, but expresses states of mind. The wonder, tension, and expectation that exist in the invisible world of sensations transfigure and permeate objects, forms, and people.” On display are works by Felice Casorati, Carlo Carrà, Cagnaccio di San Pietro, Achille Funi, Antonio Donghi, Carlo Levi, Ubaldo Oppi and several other interpreters of painting of the time.

The exhibition, the first dedicated to magic realism after the anthological exhibition that Fagiolo dell’Arco curated between 1988 and 1989 in Verona, provides, the presentation continues, “an even more extensive view of magic realism,” with insights also related to metaphysical painting and the art of the Novecento group: in essence, all painters who “operated a process of sublimation of reality” are analyzed.

The exhibition opens Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Fridays until 9 p.m., closed Mondays. Tickets: 11 euros full, 7 euros reduced (15 to 26 years old and over 65), free for under 14, disabled and friends of the museum. Single ticket for Mart, Casa Depero and Galleria Civica di Trento: 14 euros (reduced 10). All info at www.mart.trento.it.

Image: Carlo Carrà, Le figlie di Loth (1919; Mart, VAF-Stiftung Collection)

From Casorati to Carrà, magic realism is on display at the Mart

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