MATTIA MORENI
“Il Percorso interrotto – Ultimo decennio 1985-1998”
Kunsthaus HAMBURG 21 April - 25 May 2008
A great artist never thinks that his research has really ended. Mattia Moreni never stopped, but he continued to experiment until his death in 1999. To tell an artistic story full of ideas, influences and not obvious paths, the idea was born of setting up a cycle of three exhibitions that focuses on two key moments of Moreni: the first years and the last decade of life. The privileged theater of these exhibitions is Romagna, so important in the artist's biography, but also Germany and Hamburg in particular, which confirms the interest in Moreni already expressed in numerous exhibitions, including the anthology at the Kunstverein of '64. Three exhibitions which are part of a single project and which together shed new light on the work of an artist recognized as the cornerstone of the history of art in the second half of the twentieth century.
The path that leads to a deeper knowledge of Mattia Moreni begins in the city of Bagnacavallo (Ravenna) at the Museo Civico delle Cappuccine, seat of the "Preludio - Primo decennio 1941-1953" from 6 April to 7 June and ends with the exhibition "Il Percorso interrotto - Ultimo decennio 1985-1998" first at the Kunsthaus in Hamburg from April 21 to May 25 and then again in Romagna at the Magazzini del Sale in Cervia (Ravenna) from June 27 to September 7.
The comparison between these periods leads us to reflect on how Mattia Moreni's research has always been in motion and how each result has never been considered as a point of arrival, but as a stimulus to look for new languages and new forms of representation. The artist himself repeated that "obsession is the condition of research".
Never before has an exhibition been entirely dedicated to the initial phase of this relentless study. The Bagnacavallo exhibition presents itself as a unique opportunity to understand and appreciate the artist's initial charm for the postcubist syntax first, and expressionist then. But Moreni soon showed herself intolerant of too rigid a discipline made up of geometric rules and broke them with bold strokes of color. These are lively years for our country and the research overlaps: after joining the Group of Eight, Mattia Moreni is among the first to perceive the novelty of informal issues and his art will become increasingly explosive, material and gestural from this moment .
The figuration, elementary and mocking, dominates the works on display in Hamburg and Cervia carried out in the last decade before death and explores the themes that in this period attract the attention of the artist: the relationship of man in the electronic age, the regression of the species and of the painting itself. Once the refinement has disappeared, the sign becomes "regressed" and brutal; the color, strong and aggressive, is spread by the tube on often large canvases. The artist himself portrays himself in a series of self-portraits made with the same pseudo-childish style typical of this decade.
Teamwork and collaboration between cultural institutions, curators and art historians are of fundamental importance for the realization of this project. The Mattia Moreni's Archive and the Galleria d'arte Maggiore g.a.m. by Franco and Roberta Calarota worked alongside Claus Mewes director of the Kunsthaus in Hamburg, Giuseppe Masetti director of the Museo Civico delle Cappuccine and Prof. Claudio Spadoni historian of the art and director of the MAR of Ravenna. The latter and Dr. Mewes are entrusted with the critical essays collected in the catalog published by Silvana Editore with translations of the texts in German and English.
