2025 kicks off with OMBRE NOMADE. ARTE DAGLI ANNI 1930 AL 2000 – Nomad Shadows: Art from the thirties to 2000.

The focus of this exhibition is essentially on going back over a period of changing epochs: from the early twentieth century, so dense with republican ambitions, on through the arrival of the period of democracy starting after the end of the war, in both socio-political and cultural fields, including cases of situationism (some of them recent) that proclaimed the advent of such new microfractures as to force a rethinking and redefinition – in the area of art, to be sure, but also in politics – of staid identities, guiding us back above all to a sense of our own existence.

After the dark years of the thirties, we find reconstruction taking the form of new approaches of aperture, balanced continuously between figuring and abstraction. A dialogue – on condition that we avoid forcedly and trivially confusing the concept of abstraction with that of informality – that has always existed.

In other exhibition contexts, we would have focused to a greater extent on a more historical dating, on a period in the forties that saw the birth of abstract art, both in Europe and in the United States, although the exhibition does in any case also feature some such pieces.

In the specific case of this exhibition, however, we are limiting ourselves to studying art generated in Europe, a part of which – as a consequence of the racial laws – despite being born in Europe, continued its development in Israel, strengthening the Jerusalem-Berlin axis that is so strongly reminiscent of our continent’s Judeo-Christian roots. One name that comes to mind is that of Osias Hofstätter (who actually escaped racial persecution by spending a certain amount of time in Switzerland), as well as Aharon Kahana, Moshe Kupferman and David Lan-Bar, among others. Then there is Avigdor Arikha: on this occasion, we are presenting a collaboration between the writings of Samuel Beckett and the engravings of the Israeli artist for Beckett’s work L’Issue (1968) for the publisher Georges Visat of Paris.

And as it always the case with us, we are including artists who have been salvaged from oblivion, such as Dalvit, the Italian Mattia Moreni or the German Rudolf Mumprecht.

OMBRE NOMADE, with that title, seeks to ponder on the dialogue between the early twentieth century and the expansion that came after the war, which generated moments of great freedom in giving shape to a new concept of nomadism that blossomed above all from the fifties and sixties.

Mario Casanova, Bellinzona, 2024.
English translation by Pete Kercher

Photos: Works by Matti Basis, Raffi Lavie, Rudolf Mumprecht. Private collection, Switzerland.