Friday 18th November opens at Palazzo Magnani in Reggio Emilia the exhibition L’Arte Inquieta. The Urgency of Creation. Interior landscapes, maps, faces. 140 works, from Paul Klee to Anselm Kiefer curated by Giorgio Bedoni, Johann Feilacher and Claudio Spadoni.

The exhibition lays out the them of the identity, a restless identity which questions our time through paintings, sculptures, drawings, graphics and artist’s books of 57 artists, from Paul Klee to Anselm Kiefer,Pietro Ghizzardi, Carla Accardi, Alighiero Boetti, Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Keith Haring, Emilio Isgrò, Maria Lai, Antonio Ligabue, Zoran Music, Emil Nolde, Yves Tanguy.

Ghizzardi takes part in the show with two works – Donna (1960) and La bionda (1962) – from the collection of House Museum Pietro Ghizzardi.

The exhibition will be on show until 12th March 2023.

The project, which explores the multiple facets of identity, presents the public with artists who have used innovative languages to look at their own inner reality and the world around them: gazes that are increasingly important in today’s present, where arte inquieta (‘restless art’) is the upshot of personal and collective occurrences, of research, of that expressive urgency of artists displaying their own feverish activity, and with unique works still capable of surprising us.

An exhibition where the authors of the founding poetics of our modernity interface with works sometimes from excluded worlds, today considered a precious and necessary archive of imagery: art brut, therefore, I presented as visionary and with unprecedented languages, just as the great masters of the avant-garde who open the exhibition sections had already sensed: Paul Klee, as early as 1912, Max Ernst and Surrealism, through to Jean Dubuffet in 1945.

L’Arte Inquieta. L’urgenza della creazione is divided into thematic areas (the metamorphic face; seriality, obsessions and interior monologues; cartographies, maps and visionary worlds), with artists and works juxtaposed by affinity of genre and language: an exhibition itinerary that thus investigates the burning vitality of artists, the restless identity to be found in their historical outlook, as well as their desires and realities in this world.

Carla Accardi, Alighiero Boetti, Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Pietro Ghizzardi, Keith Haring, Emilio Isgrò, Paul Klee, Anselm Kiefer, Maria Lai, Antonio Ligabue, Zoran Music, Emil Nolde and Yves Tanguy are just some of the artists in the exhibition who will also be in dialogue with authors whose unpublished works are to be found in the San Lazzaro Archive of the Museum of the History of Psychiatry in Reggio Emilia, today one of the largest collections in the field in Europe.

The exhibition is the culminating moment of Identità Inquieta (‘Restless Identity’): a great choral work promoted by the city of Reggio Emilia that, in the current planning phase, involves institutions and organisations from the social, educational and cultural spheres (including Reggio Emilia Città senza Barriere, FCR of Reggio Emilia, Council Cultural Services – Civic Museums, Libraries, AUSL), with the aim of offering a rich and diverse calendar of cultural events and opportunities for active participation.