TerrAmare
PIETRO GHIZZARDI’S PAINTING
by Valter Rosa
Mu.Vi. Civic Gallery of Contemporary Art
Via Manzoni, 14 – Viadana (MN)
7th May – 18th June 2017
Opening on Sunday 7th May at 11am
Free entry
Pietro Ghizzardi goes/comes back home. More than thirty years after the irregular painter’s death and thirteen years after the exhibition „Pietro Ghizzardi“ (2004) the Mu.Vi and the Town of Viadana pay tribute to their best known fellow citizen and painter with an anthological itinerary through his production. This event is edited by Valter Rosa and has been realized in cooperation with the House Museum „Pietro Ghizzardi“. The title „TerrAmare“ („black earths“), which has been elaborated by Valter Rosa, fully captures the essence of Ghizzardi’s artistic experience: it refers to the ancestral settlements of the terramare culture, which developed in the central Po valley between 1650 and 1150 b.C. By analogy it reminds of an expressive primitivism, which perpetrated since those remote times up until the present through representation, something Ghizzardi was – thanks to his pictorial inventiveness, which regarded not only the forms but also his choice of materials – undoubtedly an exponent of.
„TerrAmare“ also refers to the profound and ambivalent connection between Ghizzardi and the land, in its double meaning: native and chosen place, home of his loved ones and of his memories, which he collected during the 1960s in „Mi richordo anchora“ (Ghizzardi’s autobiography, which was published by Einaudi in 1976, won the Viareggio Award in 1977 and was republished by Quodlibet in 2016), but also soil, substance and instrument of his work, ordering origin of life and time, with its cycles and rhythms which the industrialization and mechanization would forever fracture, interrupting that continuity, often painful and marked by struggle and unpredictability, which coincided with the millennial balance of the farming civilization.
The itinerary that the curator explored finds structure in 27 works from the 1950s and 1980s, among which some big format paintings on plywood – all borrowed from the House Museum „Pietro Ghizzardi“ – and the Bestiary mural painting, which was realized on the external wall of the Vittoria Cinema in Viadana (Mantua) in 1981 and transferred inside the MuVi museum in 2010. The itinerary intersects as well the trajectory of Ghizzardi’s writing, which is strongly tied to the pictorial event.
„TerrAmare“ is accompanied by a catalogue of the works, which were photographed by Alessandro Bosoni. The catalogue also contains an in-depth critical paper by Valter Rosa, which constitutes a significant development towards the historical documentation of the artist’s work, as well as texts by Councillor for Culture Ilaria Zucchini, by the director of the Mu.Vi Civic Gallery of Contemporary Art Paolo Conti and by Lucia Ghizzardi.
You can visit the exhibition, promoted by Viadana’s Council for Culture with the contribution of Gruppo Mauro Saviola and Arti Grafiche Castello, from 7th May until 18th June, every day from 4pm to 7pm.
Free entry.