Meticulous care, control, modularity, paring back, reduction to purity of structure, analysis, use of monochrome, rhythm. There is a common thread linking the pursuits of many artists between the end of the 1950s and the 1970s, a search for a new beginning in contrast to the past, which had been characterised by the Informal. Rebelling against the concept of art as a liberating activity, uncontrolled and subjective, as well as the idea of the merging of art and life, this generation conceived of art as an autonomous activity, disciplined by the analysis of language, verifiable, repeatable, modular.

Art which tends to strip down to the essential, aware as it is of the distinctive quality of artistic language, of the gap between art and life. Art which is actually pre-existent with regard to the artwork, which thus loses its aura of uniqueness, its creation via a transcendent gesture, its shamanistic quality and becomes rather a replicable object, closer to the idea of design. Zero, Nul, Azimuth, the names of the groups and magazines to which these artists belonged, stressed the tendency towards purity, simplification and precision. A zone of silence and of pure possibility, a new beginning, a positive vision of the future and of the unlimited potential of art. Within this framework, which is not limited to any historical period or specific artistic groups, but which in conceptual terms spans the output of numerous artists, we can place Dadamaino and Scheggi, Simeti, Agnetti, Aubertin, Calzolari, Boetti, Bonalumi, but also Melotti, with his sculptures in which space is scanned rhythmically and the elements resemble musical scores made up of ideograms; Griffa, whose analytical painting returns to the primary elements of language, strokes and colours; Isgrò, with his Erasure, which is a form of “linguistic cleansing”; Pistoletto, whose mirror paintings draw the spectator into the work, thus stripping away the aura of the sacred and the immutable often associated with art; and Uncini, whose works derive from a geometric-spatial quest that highlights constructive and architectural principles.

In the exhibition MINIMALIA Studio Guastalla Arte Moderna e Contemporanea is proud to present around thirty works which amply illustrate this approach to art.