VERO AMORE (TRUE LOVE)

With works by: Schifano, Festa, Angeli, Rotella, Fioroni, Lombardo, Mauri, Mondino…
Curated by Riccardo Passoni

GAM of Turin, continuing its activities to enhance enjoyment and appreciation of its endowments, is unveiling a new display of the Italian Pop Art works from its collections. A selection of sixty works including paintings, sculpture and videos, this tour entitled Vero Amore (True Love), after Mario Schifano’s work of 1962, reflects on the historical aspect of Pop Art in Italy.

Pop Art emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the United States and England as a reaction of artists, mainly painters, to the visual bombardment of the new consumer society based on the predominance of advertising and mass media. The artists abandoned Arte Informale and abstract expressionism of the 1950s to embrace a new figurative movement that alluded to or cited the language of advertising. At the same time, parallel currents developed in Italy too.

The principle aspects examined by critics in recent analyses of the phenomenon include, on the one hand, a study of the news accounts of the 1960s to search for direct ties with the explosion of the American Pop Art phenomenon on Italian soil at the 1964 Venice Biennale, and on the other, to focus on the cultural background of the Italian artists, pointing to the contiguity and the distance from their international fellows.

The exhibition itinerary illustrates the different stylistic morphologies of the artists, including Franco Angeli, Mario Ceroli, Tano Festa, Giosetta Fioroni, Sergio Lombardo, Fabio Mauri, Pino Pascali, Salvatore Scarpitta and Mario Schifano. On the Piedmont side, this presentation includes works by Antonio Carena, Piero Gilardi, Aldo Mondino, Ugo Nespolo, Max Pellegrini and Michelangelo Pistoletto. In the background, among the many other proposals on view – the presentation of important collateral results that were not Pop Art but emerged in that climate of research and development – there are examples of pioneering explorations by Mimmo Rotella and Enrico Baj.

Vero Amore (True Love) is also the occasion for presenting Simboli del Concilio (Symbols of the Council) (1965) by Ezio Gribaudo (b. Turin, 1929) to the public for the first time. At the suggestion of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, GAM Director, the artist generously donated the work to the museum in 2017. This important painting is perfectly in harmony with the theme of the exposition because it epitomizes Gribaudo’s Pop period and will add to the lustre of the GAM collections.

The layout and staging of the works of Italian Pop Art is curated by Riccardo Passoni. This tour is based on the selection of works that GAM made for the “Io Non Amo la Natura” [I Do Not Love Nature] project of the CRC Foundation (Complesso Monumentale di San Francesco, Cuneo, 27 May – 22 October 2017).

GAM thanks the Guido and Ettore De Fornaris Foundation and the CRT Foundation for Modern and Contemporary Art for their collaboration in enhancing the museum collections.