Giuseppe Capogrossi, a tonal painter of great impact for the development of the history of art of the last century in Rome, Italy, and beyond its borders, literally leaves his 'mark', made known by the abstract expressive vocabulary developed in the 1950s. It was in fact characterized by a creative path that passes from the figurative plane to a conception increasingly aimed at abstraction, in which the rarefaction of the composition gives way to pure form and to the space under construction.
This important formal transformation lays the foundations precisely in the tonal and figurative season of the Thirties which, in its own right, becomes part of the Roman School and which is well represented by Elena and Claudio Cerasi collection at Palazzo Merulana.
Two paintings from those years were in fact purchased by the Cerasi couple at the end of the 1980s: "Gita in barca, I canottieri; Departure in sandolino" from 1932 and "Ballo sul fiume" from 1936, both characterized by a compactness of vision and a geometricism without depth that gives the images a lightness and a timeless light. Above all, the second work declares a fifteenth-century Tuscan quotationism that fully evokes the desire for a cultural renaissance, already in some way an indication of the master's next abstract season.
Palazzo Merulana has already told how some great artists of the twentieth century have dedicated themselves to the evolution and metamorphosis of their pictorial research on a formal level: an example of this is the 2019 Giacomo Balla exhibition. From abstract futurism to iconic futurism, curated by Fabio Benzi, who illustrated the artist's change of perspective, oriented, in the final phase of his production, towards figuration.
Now the museum intends to share with the public what was a moment of extreme importance for the artistic research of Giuseppe Capogrossi, a painter who was able to manipulate his artistic creations starting from a figurative fabric that is gradually more and more marked, thanks also to a evocative use of color, full and absolute.
On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the artist's death, Palazzo Merulana will propose a cultural mediation entitled “From dream to sign: Giuseppe Capogrossi figurative in the Elena and Claudio Cerasi Collection”.