Milan, at Bottegantica an exhibition on women in the art of Giacomo Balla

From April 1 to 30, 2022, Galleria Bottegantica in Milan is dedicating an exhibition to the theme of women in the art of Giacomo Balla. Entitled Balla al femminile. Between intimism and the search for the real, the exhibition explores this particular aspect of the art of Balla, one of the most important and original exponents of 20th-century Italian art. A special “preview” with a selection of works from the exhibition can already be had at the Miart fair from March 31 to April 3 where the gallery will be present in the Decades section at booth A100.

Four years after the exhibition Giacomo Balla. Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe (2018), which focused on the painter’s Futurist experience, Bottegantica is dedicating an exhibition to the declinations of femininity interpreted by the artist in two seemingly distant periods of his production, the Divisionist period of the early 20th century and the figurative-realist period of the 1930s and 1940s. The exhibition, curated by art historian Elena Gigli, who guards and preserves the artist’s Archive, presents, alongside two works executed by Balla in the early twentieth century, a selected nucleus of paintings by the mature Balla. Such juxtaposition makes it possible to create a dialogue between the different ways of interpreting figuration of early and late Balla, under the banner of the centrality of the female figure.

In the works in the exhibition Balla reveals his ability to enter the soul of those he wants to portray, moved by the quest to render reality in a profound and sincere way. Quiete operosa (1898) and La famiglia Stiavelli (1905) are part of the season of early 20th century portraits in which women are often the protagonists, depicted in interiors or in the open spaces of Villa Borghese. One can sense in these two works Balla’s intent to capture the real in an overall view that is both psychological and ambient, in which the interiority of the subjects dialogues with their surroundings. In Quiete operosa, Balla portrays Elisa Marcucci, whom he would marry in 1904, intent on embroidery near a window; light radiates into the room, creating a delicate chiaroscuro. In La Famiglia Stiavelli, on the other hand, a white, almost artificial light frontally illuminates every element of the studio, drawing attention as much to the family-the painter at the easel, her husband and the girls with their fixed gaze-as to the objects in the atelier.

In the summer of 1929 Balla moved with his family to 39B Via Oslavia. Casa Balla soon became the home where the emotional and artistic relationships between the artist and his family, his wife Elisa, two daughters, Luce and Elica, and cousin Francesca Marcucci, became intertwined. In the painting Timidity, executed in 1932, the model is precisely his daughter Luce, who poses on the terrace engaging the viewer with her gaze. In Perfume of Roses (1940), the vivid colors of the petals, invested with light, refract in the surrounding space, re-proposing that dialogue between subject and environment that moves Balla in his perception of reality and search for truth. Finally, the female universe expands to include the family friend, the young Giuliana Canuzzi, who poses for the cycle of Four Seasons in Red, made between 1939 and 1940. Taking inspiration from the artistic and fashion photography of those years, Balla bathes the model in a warm, energetic and vital red and illuminates her with a warm, grazing light from below, emphasizing the modernity of this female figure, a symbol of the renewal of the seasons and at the same time a diva of her time. A catalog by Bottegantica and Sagep editions, edited by Elena Gigli, accompanies the exhibition.

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Giacomo Balla, The Four Seasons

alla, The Four Seasons

Milan, at Bottegantica an exhibition on women in the art of Giacomo Balla

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