Jackson Pollock. The figure of the fury

It is dedicated to Jackson Pollock, one of the great protagonists of world art of the XX century, the exhibition conceived and curated by Sergio Risaliti and Francesca Campana Comparini and promoted by the Commune of Florence under the aegis of the Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo and with the collaboration of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence.

For the first time the city of Florence dedicates an exhibition to the American artist Jackson Pollock who with his impetuous and deeply emotional paintings changed the course of the American art history and not only it influencing in a decisive and crucial way the contemporary painting. This is not an really art exhibition but rather a real "challenge" between two languages and two worlds separated by hundreds of years and thousands of miles. The curators have thought the exhibition as a dialogue between the order and harmony of the artworks of Michelangelo, the Renaissance genius and icon of Italian art in the world, and the unconscious and the passion of the artworks of Pollock representing an universe that goes beyond what our reason can make us to perceive and understand.

The exhibition project is divided into two sections. In Palazzo Vecchio (symbol and headquarters of political power in Florence but also the place that hosts Genius of Victory, one of Michelangelo’s world-famous artworks) it is hosted a series of artworks from museums and collections pivate in Tel Aviv, Amsterdam, Rome, New York as well as some early drawings of Pollock exceptionally loan from the Metropolitan Museum in New York that demonstrate the interest of the American artist in Michelangelo especially during the period when he followed the teachings of Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. The second section, hosted in the complex of San Firenze, offers interactive, multimedia and educational spaces allowing visitors to view some movies about the life and art of the artist proposing more comparisons between Pollock’s work and that of Michelangelo.

Important in the career of Pollock is his approach when he was 25 years old with the world of psychology that allows him to discover concepts such as the unconscious and the irrational and determine its shift to the informal art. The title of the exhibition, The figure of fury, recalls Pollock’s impetus both physical and psychological in the act of painting canvas when turning around these almost dancing, pervaded by strong impetus and passion remembering with this behavior the magical and propitiatory rites practiced by Native Americans that draw on the sand favoring the breath of the soul, an inner rhythm that is different from that typical of New Yorkers of that era and beyond.

Pollock 's works also refer to a primitive sphere and mysterious symbols and rituals that calls of indigenous Americans. Through the dripping, that is dripping colors on a canvas placed horizontally and not on the stand, Pollock gets a space without boundaries and hierarchies, a chaotic tangle of signs metaphor of the human condition of those years, that also brings to mind the tangles bodies of the Battle of the Centaurs by Michelangelo.

An opportunity to learn about the fury, the rage that Michelangelo and Pollock transmit when they work on their artworks to let us amaze as well as they used to impress their contemporaries.

Palazzo Vecchio and Complesso San Firenze

Piazza della Signoria, 1
Piazza San Firenze
Florence 50100 Italy
www.pollockfirenze.it/index.html

Opening Hours:

Every day from 10 am to 10 pm

Related Images:

Jackson Pollock. Earth Worms, 1946. Tel Aviv Museum of Art Collection, gift from Peggy Guggenheim, Venezia attraverso l’American-Israel Cultural Foundation, 1954 © Jackson Pollock, by SIAE 2014
Jackson Pollock, Untitled, 1937-1939. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York