BURRI / FONTANA / AFRO / CAPOGROSSI. Dalla realtà in macerie alla bellezza della pittura

Selected graphic works, multiples, books, drawings and a selection of unique works by Burri, Fontana, Capogrossi and Afro trace a path to one of the most tragic and equally sublime seasons of Italian and international art: the Informal.
At the end of the Second World War, art questioned the plausibility and the possibility of representing a world whose very elementary structures of existence and meaning had been shattered under the blows of violence and oppression, and the suffering generated by these. So, as described by Giulio Carlo Argan Informal art was the “response of art to the inauthentic way of life that has been imposed upon man.”
Using essays and iconographic and historical-artistic appendixes, the book traces the artistic researches and experimentations of the four artists for whom graphic work was not a secondary and collateral activity to painting, but an independent research, even though sometimes not completely parallel, through which they were able to renew their experiments with techniques, develop collaborations, rely on a greater circulation of their works and further elaborate sign and gesture as founding elements of their poetics.
The catalogue was published on the occasion of the exhibition at Museo Civico di Villa dei Cedri in Bellinzona (24th March- 2nd September 2018).