From 7th February to 6th April, in the Upper Rooms of Palazzo Santa Margherita, Galleria civica di Modena is presenting “La variante e la regola. Opere su carta tra arte concreta, minimalismo e pittura analitica dalla collezione della Galleria civica di Modena”.

The exhibition, curated by Serena Goldoni and Marco Pierini, draws on the gallery’s own Collection as well as the graphic works from the Don Casimiro Bettelli Collection (granted on loan to the gallery by the modenese curia since 1999), covering the concrete, geometric, minimalist and analytical research ranging from the mid-late 1940s right up to the 1970s.

The exhibition itinerary suggests the presence of an ideal diachronic thread running between various fields of research, which however different, are all oriented towards an aniconic style capable of exploiting colours, lines and shapes without allusive or symbolic implications, free from any reference to the real world and based exclusively on shape and colour. The research developed by movements such as the MAC (Movimento per l'Arte Concreta), founded in Milan in 1948 in contrast with Realism and the influence of the Informal movements, is put across very accurately by Gillo Dorfles, the theorist of the group: it is an art “…based merely on the implementation and objectivisation of the artist’s intuition, rendered in concrete form-colour images, far from all symbolic meaning, from all formal abstraction, aiming to pick up only those rhythms, cadences and chords that the world of colour is so full of” (1949).

The exhibition constitutes the logical continuation of the show held in 2014 examining the Informal in Italy; it focuses on a similar period (only a little later) yet deals with a totally different climate and a broader geographic basis, this time not limited to Italy alone. Among the artists on show, we might mention:Getulio Alviani, Alberto Biasi, Max Bill, Agostino Bonalumi, Enrico Castellani, Giorgio Griffa, Sol LeWitt, Francesco Lo Savio, Brice Marden, François Morellet, Mario Nigro, Claudio Olivieri, Mauro Reggiani, Robert Ryman, Turi Simeti, Claudio Verna, Victor Vasarely, Luigi Veronesi. As part of a project set up in 2011 aimed at displaying the heritage of the Galleria Civica di Modena on a regular basis, the exhibition will remain on display until 6th April 2015.

Also at Palazzo Santa Margherita, in the main hall, the exhibition entitled “The Cinema Show. Fotografie dalla Collezione della Galleria civica di Modena’” may also be visited, on display until 7th June.