MANAS | Musée d’Art Naïf et d’Arts Singuliers de Laval and the Casa Museo Pietro Ghizzardi announce Pietro Ghizzardi. Un bestiaire réinventé, an exceptional solo exhibition presenting a selection of more than 65 artworks, belonging to the collection of the Casa Museo Ghizzardi and mostly unreleased, illustrating more than thirty years (1950s – 1980s) of the irregular artist’s production.
The exhibition opens on 9th February 2024 at 6.30 p.m. and can be visited from 10th February to 19th May 2024 at the MANAS | Musée d’Art Naïf et d’Arts Singuliers Vieux Chatel in Laval, Europe’s first museum of irregular art, established in 1972, which holds a 1965 Ghizzardi self-portrait in its collection.
Twenty years after the retrospective Pietro Ghizzardi (2004) at the Musée International d’Art Naïf Anatole Jakowsky in Nice, France, a country that has always been at the forefront in the reception and appreciation of irregular and ‘hors-normes’ art in general and of Ghizzardi’s production in particular, is once again hosting a large solo exhibition dedicated to the artist.
The exhibition aims to investigate Pietro Ghizzardi’s painting, analysing in particular his depiction of the animal and natural world, which is inextricably linked to his emblematic portraiture, presenting for the first time to the French public not only pictorial works but also plastic (four bronze sculptures) and manuscripts (the manuscript of the unpublished il mio libro mondiale solare e lunare – My Solar and Lunar World Book, 1986).
In addition to the works of art, the exhibition includes photographic and audiovisual documents from the Archivio Storico Pietro Ghizzardi that frame and explore aspects of the author’s biography and artistic production.
The exhibition is divided into four sections: Un répertoire obsessionnel, which focuses on portraits of both human subjects – particularly women – and animals – wild, exotic and domestic, in each case anthropomorphised – and thus on the artist’s reinterpretation of reality through his sign; Une morphologie en plans serrés, dedicated to Ghizzardi’s pictorial exploration of the landscape around him, which he constantly reinterprets and repopulates with human and animal presences within the narrow boundaries of his cardboards; Un bestiaire réinventé, the section that gives its name to the exhibition and focuses on the depiction of animals and the “reinvention” of fauna – both native and exotic – through which Ghizzardi recreates and idealises the natural world, always anthropomorphic, always close to the human in posture but with moral tentions that are essentially inclined towards the good, even in the ferocity sometimes acted out by the animal subjects; Un mal fantasmé, finally, investigates the relationship between the painter and spirituality, Christian and Catholic symbologies syncretically meet rituals and customs of the peasant world of 20th-century Northern Italy, translating them into often perturbing and surreal figurations.
The exhibition is curated by Antoinette Le Falher, director of MANAS | Musée d’Art Naïf et d’Arts Singuliers in Laval, and is accompanied by a 121-page catalogue in French and Italian, which contains the critical text Una via d’uscita (A Way Out) by Valter Rosa.
MANAS | Musée d’Art Naïf et d’Arts Singuliers
Place de la Trémoille
Laval
Opening hours
Tuesday to Saturday: 9:00-12:00 a.m. and 1:30-6:00 p.m.
Sunday: 2:00-6:00 p.m.
Free admission
Reservations
+33 02 53 74 12 30 | accueil.musees@laval.fr
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