In Milan the first major monographic exhibition dedicated to Tullio Pericoli, his adopted city

From Oct. 13, 2021 to Jan. 9, 2022, Milan’s Palazzo Reale, in the rooms of the Appartamento dei Principi (Princes’ Apartment), will host the first major monographic exhibition that the Lombard capital dedicates to Tullio Pericoli (Colli del Tronto, 1936), his adopted city since 1961.

The exhibition, titled Frammenti, is curated by Michele Bonuomo, in collaboration with the artist, is produced and promoted by Comune di Milano Cultura, Palazzo Reale, Skira Editore and Design Terrae, and the installation is by Pierluigi Cerri. A tribute to the great career of Tullio Pericoli, a prolific artist whose works have been visible in exhibitions, newspapers and books, the exhibition is intended to be a reflection on the activity of the artist, who in the last two decades has devoted himself to landscapes, but also to portraying cultural figures; his forays into the theater are also well known, with the staging of works for the Zurich Opernhaus and the Teatro alla Scala in Milan.

“I paint landscapes,” Tullio Pericoli writes, “to learn their language and read their pages. A reading that always starts from geology. I also paint them as a reminder that one cannot and should not get rid of memory, to follow a history that layer by layer winds its way through infinite times. But this is perhaps not entirely true. I do not paint landscapes to make landscapes. I paint them mostly for the pleasure of painting, and of making one painting after another.”

Present in the exhibition are more than 150 works, from 1977 to 2021: much of the artist’s latest production still focuses on landscape. In the room dedicated to portraits, there is a sort of assembly of the most important figures of the international cultural scene, friends, colleagues, inspirers: physiognomies faithful and at the same time transfigured.

In 1961, at the urging of Cesare Zavattini, Tullio Pericoli moved to Milan, where he still lives. He began collaborating with Il Giorno with drawings accompanying stories by Calvino, Levi, Gadda and Soldati. In the following years his drawings would appear in the most important newspapers, both Italian and foreign. In 1984 he began working at La Repubblica, with which he still collaborates today. At the same time his pictorial research, which had begun in the early 1970s with the series of “geologies,” continued with a cycle of works that would result, in 1980, in the exhibition Stealing from Klee at Galleria Il Milione in Milan. Landscape became increasingly central to his work: in 1984 the volume Robinson Crusoe for Olivetti marked a turning point, and the drawings that comprise it would be exhibited for the first time at the PAC in Milan. In 1987, commissioned by Livio Garzanti, he created a mural painting in the historic Via della Spiga headquarters in Milan that recounted the life of his publishing house, and in 1991 Milan dedicated a major exhibition to him in the Sala delle Cariatidi at Palazzo Reale. The landscapes of his homeland are the backdrop for the sets and costumes of Donizetti’sElisir d’Amore, which he totally reinvented for the Zurich Opernhaus in 1995 and in 1998 for the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. In 2002 he made the sets and costumes for Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia again for the Zurich Opernhaus. In the last two decades his work has increasingly focused on landscape painting. In 2010 an extensive exhibition at the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome entitled Lineamenti offers a pictorial synthesis of his two main forms of expression.

For more info: palazzorealemilano.it

Hours: Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.; Thursday until 10:30 p.m. Closed Mondays.

Tickets: Full 6 euros, reduced 4 euros.

Image: Tullio Pericoli, Loss of an Eye (2011; oil on plaster cast, 90 x 180 cm)

In Milan the first major monographic exhibition dedicated to Tullio Pericoli, his adopted city

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