La famosa invasione degli artisti a Milano

In a key moment for Milan, for the second time location of the Universal Exposition after the historic edition of 1906, artists, designers and writers are called to interpret, through their works, splendour and misery of a constantly evolving city. Middle earth of the subalpine plain and crossing point between the Mediterranean and the European continent, Milan has always functioned as an important melting pot of cultures, marking, with its development, the course of History. Founded by the Celts in the IV century B.C., the city, surrounded by the rivers Olona, Lambro and Seveso, already capital of the Roman Empire, of the Lombard Kingdom and of the Cisalpine Republic, wasn’t just one of the landmarks of the Risorgimento, but also the epicenter of the Futurism movement and of the Industrial Revolution.

During the Twentieth Century Milan was a place of radical socio-cultural transformations, a workshop producing thoughts and contemporary art, from the Ritorno All’Ordine of the 1900s to the optical and kinetic experimentations of Azimuth and Group N. Furthermore, in the shadow of the Madonnina, grew the myth of the hard-working, somber city, but also the myth of the Milano Da Bere of the Eighties, which became the emblem of the Hedonism. Crucial center for fashion and design, today Milan is a global city, the third largest in Europe after London and Paris, and the most visited Italian one.

While the Expo tackles a broader theme, such as the agro-alimentary resources matter, this exhibition investigates the current identity of the city hosting it. The question is whether the geographical and territorial centrality inherent to Milan’s own toponym (Mediolanum – middle earth) still coincides with a main and strategic role. By now, none of the artists is able to make such a judgment, because only their vision, hanging in the balance between fantasy and design, between nostalgia and utopia, is able to finally give a face and an image to a dynamic reality, ceaselessly progressing.

The show, inspired by the title of a well-known novel by Dino Buzzati (The Bears’ Famous Invasion Of Sicily), is divided in two exhibition grounds, the Sala Delle Colonne at the Fabbrica Del Vapore and the gallery Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea in Via Solferino.

Making a comparison between the works of renowned artists and designers – from Marco Cingolani to Alessandro Mendini, from Salvo to Barnaba Fornasetti, to Giovanni Frangi and Aldo Damioli – and the works of emerging artists and street artists, The Artists’ Famous Invasion Of Milan proposes to sound out the different souls of the city in a random space-temporal dimension, which alternates past and present, dream and reality, lowbrow and intellectual culture, to reconstruct, for better or worse, the identikit of a city more and more prismatic and unfathomable.

Exhibition period:
From June 3 to July 24, 2015 c/o Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea
From June 3 to June 27, 2015 c/o Sala Delle Colonne – Fabbrica Del Vapore

Opening: June 3, 2015 from 6 to 9 p.m. (to 11 p.m. c/o Fabbrica del Vapore)

Artists