With its “Bread and Roses” exhibition the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro reflects on the theme of EXPO 2015, highlighting the human need to feed both body and spirit.

The expression “Bread and Roses”, coined by Marx, taken up by the American suffragettes and adopted by the workers movement from 1912, masterfully sums up the need to associate bread with the deep desire to be nourished with affective ties and projects, and roses with the necessity to cultivate passions, to acquire knowledge, to weave social relationships.

The image that the curator, Marco Meneguzzo, wanted to impress on this exhibition is that of art as metaphor of a problem, rather than a “document” of existence. For this reason, five artists were chosen who come from completely different genres, generations and poetics, whose common thread is the ability to develop a theme or condition, through fabulous metaphors that are separated from the immediate relationship with the problem, but that subtly come back to it in a more universal and enduring way through the powerful influence of allegory.

Gianni Caravaggio, Loris Cecchini, Chiara Dynys, Pino Deodato and Giuseppina Giordano have interpreted the theme “feed the planet” according to highly personalised and not casual visions. In almost all cases we are dealing with works that were created in recent years, before the theme became the Expo slogan, or, for some of the artists, they concern their own fields of research and action. The result, therefore, is an exhibition that emphasises how artists are intuitive and prophetic concerning the great questions of humans and humanity, even when their work appears personal, spiritual or even metaphysical.

To accompany the exhibition the fifth bilingual (Italian/English) edition of the “Quaderni”, containing a critical essay Marco Meneguzzo, will illustrate the works installed in the exhibition space and give an account of the research and activity of each artist.