From November 15, 2025 to March 1, 2026, Ca’ Pesaro - Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna di Venezia will host an anthological exhibition dedicated to Gastone Novelli (Vienna, 1925 - Milan, 1968), among the most significant protagonists of Italian painting after World War II. The exhibition, curated by Elisabetta Barisoni and Paola Bonani with the collaboration of theArchivio Gastone Novelli in Rome, begins with the recent donation to the civic collections of two works by the artist by his heirs: two works that mark the extremes of his mature production(Era glaciale, 1958 and Allunga il passo amico mio, 1967).
The exhibition pays tribute to Novelli on the centenary of his birth, with the intention of offering a complete survey of his research path through a selection of representative works from important public and private Italian collections. It is also an opportunity to deepen and enhance the results of the most recent studies dedicated to his work, in particular the General Catalogue of the works of painting and sculpture, published in 2011 by the Gastone Novelli Archive in Rome in collaboration with the Mart - Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto. It was precisely the Mart that had hosted, in 1999, the last major anthological exhibition dedicated to him by a public institution, after the one held in 1988 by the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome.
The exhibition set up at Ca’ Pesaro takes place in the eight rooms on the museum’s second floor and includes about sixty works that cover the most intense period of Novelli’s production, from 1957 to 1968. It starts with the informal works created during the years of the magazine L’Esperienza Moderna, founded together with Achille Perilli in 1957, and continues with the works of the early 1960s, in which the artist elaborates a personal synthesis between visual and verbal language. The itinerary culminates in the works with the most explicit ethical and political significance, those that Novelli collected for his solo room at the 1968 Venice Biennale.
Alongside some of his best-known masterpieces, the exhibition also presents numerous works hitherto thought to be missing and rediscovered only after the publication of the General Catalog, many of them never before exhibited to the public. The exhibition is completed by a documentary section that restores the liveliness of the artist’s intellectual life, his many interests-particularly in literature-and the dense web of relationships he maintained with artist friends, writers and intellectuals of his time.
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| Venice, an anthological exhibition dedicated to Gastone Novelli at Ca' Pesaro. Two of his works donated to the civic collections |
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