Turin's GAM dedicates an exhibition to Carlo Levi, 120 years after his birth

On the occasion of the one hundred and twentieth anniversary of the birth of Carlo Levi, GAM in Turin, in collaboration with the Circolo dei lettori Foundation, is dedicating the exhibition Carlo Levi. Viaggio in Italia: places and faces, curated by Elena Loewenthal and Luca Beatrice and open to the public from February 10 to May 8, 2022. The exhibition is part of an articulated project of meetings, reflections and in-depth studies to reread the figure of painter, writer, intellectual, journalist and protagonist of cultural and social life for much of the Italian twentieth century. It is therefore intended to bring out the complexity of Carlo Levi through the program Tutta la vita è lontano, curated by the Fondazione Circolo dei lettori with GAM - Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, CAMERA - Centro Italiano per la Fotografia, Museo Nazionale del Cinema, involving painting, literature, fiction, photography and cinema.

Set up in the spaces of the GAM’s Wunderkammer, the exhibition will present thirty paintings made by Carlo Levi between 1923 and 1973: works that testify to the different stylistic developments of his research, which started at a very young age from a strongly objective painting, then moving towards a more expressionist representation, finally reaching a modern realism after World War II.

The curators intend to highlight two of the aspects that best characterize the artist’s figurative art, the portrait and the landscape, with the exhibition of eleven paintings from the Carlo Levi Foundation in Rome, eight works from the GAM collections, as well as from the Carlo Levi Pinacoteca in Aliano and private collections.

In his extensive painting production, the portrait is one of the most frequent themes, and the theoretical significance has been analyzed by the painter in a numerous series of writings. Made largely in the family sphere, however, many of his models belong to distinguished personalities of Italian and foreign culture and politics.

Among the twenty-five works by Carlo Levi kept at GAM, completed between 1923 and 1953, which arrived in the museum collection thanks to important acquisitions, and also thanks to the Guido and Ettore De Fornaris Foundation, which contributed to its expansion with sixteen acquisitions, eight works will be on display, including important portraits, such as Edoardo Persico reading from 1928, evidence of the enduring friendship between Levi and the Neapolitan art critic.Also very intense are the Portrait of Carlo Mollino and the small and familiar self-portrait The Bed (A letto), chosen at the Venice Biennale as early as 1930. Also present, though not part of the portraits, will be The Brothers (from the cycle Christ Stopped at Eboli), also purchased at the Venice Biennale in 1954.

From the Carlo Levi Foundation in Rome, on the other hand, come a series of natural landscapes and urban views, another constant theme in the figurative production of the artist, who, from 1926 to 1974, produced a numerous series of paintings dedicated to the cities or realities with which he had the most intense emotional and cultural relationships: Turin, Alassio, Paris, Lucania and Rome. These are landscapes that represent a biographical and existential journey, such as The Bombed House of 1942 or Roofs of Rome of 1951, but also a particular vision of the bond between man and landscape, such as the Lungomare made in Alassio in 1928 or The Lovers of the Land of 1973.

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Image: Carlo Levi, Portrait of Luisa Levi (1934; oil on canvas, 61 x 50.3 cm; Turin, GAM - Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Guido and Ettore De Fornaris Foundation)

Turin's GAM dedicates an exhibition to Carlo Levi, 120 years after his birth

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