A selection of paintings and sculptures that illustrates some of the main stages in the history of art of the twentieth century, is visible in the spaces of the Galleria d'Arte Maggiore g.a.m. in a path that welcomes the visitor to accompany him between the suggestions of Italian, French and American masters and returning a varied overview of Western art and its languages from the first half of the twentieth century to the present day.
Different interpretations of space, matter and reality are the elements that constitute the fil rouge of this exhibition. A matter transfigured by removing and adding, free from any figurative impetus and attentive rather to express the impulses moved by deep feelings is the one shaped by Leoncillo, who introduces the viewer to the discourse of Informal Art through his sculptures in terracotta and stoneware on display in the exhibition (Taglio Rosso, 1963; Gocce Rosse, 1959).
It is the same discourse undertaken towards the end of the 1940s and which went down in history in the United States under the name of Abstract Expressionism, of which a testimony can be seen in the exhibition in a mixed technique on canvas that Franz Kline created in 1950 (Untitled, 1950) and in which the creative gesture is supported by a chromatic material whose density bears the trace of an action that sheds light on the artist's subjective world. The matter interpreted to challenge the traditional conceptions of pictorial space is the one found in Lucio Fontana's Concetti Spaziali, where the two-dimensionality of the canvas is overcome with a clean cut (Concetto Spaziale, Attesa, 1959) or with the tearing of a hole (Concetto Spaziale, 1962; Concetto Spaziale 1963-1964), in order to break the temporal limit of the material to shape a new dimension stretching to infinity. The exploration of other dimensions starting from the observation of reality, is what Giorgio De Chirico developed with his Metaphysics, whose masterful version of Hector and Andromache, among other works, is present in the exhibition allowing the public to immerse in the dreamlike and suspended dimension that characterizes all De Chirico's artworks. The reality analyzed in its mechanisms of production and consumption is the one told by Arman with his Accumulation, and in particular with the sculpture Rampante, a reduced version of the monumental work dedicated to Ferrari realized in 1999 with the promotion of the Galleria d'Arte g.a.m. and installed in front of the Imola's racetrack, a vision of objective and tangible reality that is at the antipodes of the one of Giorgio Morandi, who through his still lifes and landscapes pursues with silent tenacity the attempt to grasp the abstraction that constitutes the founding essence of everything surrounding us. The exhibition develops in the pop atmospheres of Allen Jones's paintings, where it is depicted a sublimated reality characterized by female presences that evoke, through simplified forms and strong colors, the complex world of eroticism and desire. The exhibition's path follows with a piece by Giacomo Balla on his phase of analysis of reality through the observation of prism and light. Finally, representing Italian sculpture in its most recent historical expressions is the work Asse del Movimento (1983-1987) by Arnaldo Pomodoro, in which the purity of the triangular geometric element is undermined by a deep laceration that cuts through the bronze, and seems reminding us how the dimension of reality is not comparable with the idea of perfection but rather on that of perfectibility.
