FOCUS | MARIO SIRONI IN THE ALLARIA COLLECTION
Curated by Daniela Ferrari and Alessandra Tiddia
Mart, Rovereto
5 March ― 11 June 2017
Sunday 5 March 2017 from 10 am to 6 pm: opening for the public with free admission and events
This Focus exhibition on Mario Sironi is an opportunity for the public to get to know the works from the collection of Antonio Allaria, which officially became part of Mart’s permanent collection in early 2017.
On display are more than 60 paintings and drawings by Sironi which dialogue with works by other artists in the collection, including Renato Guttuso, Anton Zoran Mušič and Graham Vivian Sutherland.
Focus Collections
The calendar of Mart is periodically supplemented by thematic and monographic exhibitions dedicated to the collections that constitute the museum’s patrimony.
This is the Focus program, designed to explore the roots of contemporary Italian art, the historical international movements and new emerging trends, starting from the vast collections of Mart, which includes, in addition to artworks, valuable documents conserved in the 20th-Century Archive.
In 2016 this new exhibition format enabled Mart’s visitors to enjoy the long-term research project MATERIALE IMMATERIALE. PROGETTO VVV VerboVisualeVirtuale, realized in collaboration with Museion and the Bruno Kessler Foundation; the works of Mario Raciti from the Carlo Damiano Donation, as well as the VAF-Stiftung Collection, the Volker W. Feierabend Collection and the Domenico Talamoni Collection; the photographic series Mediterraneo by Mimmo Jodice from the “I Cotroneo” Collection. Furthermore, with materials from the 20th-Century Archive, Mart realized the exhibitions Disegnare la villeggiatura and Tra nucleare e patafisica (open until 30 April).
The 2017 calendar includes two more Focus exhibitions curated by the 20th-Century Archive: Costruire con la luce: fotografie di architettura dagli archivi del Mart (7 May - 27 August), and La rivista come luogo di ricerca artistica: il portale Capti (3 September - 28 January).
Along with these projects, Mart presents two important shows dedicated to two major Italian private collections: the Allaria Collection (5 March - 11 June )and the Panza di Biumo Collection (2 April - 2 July).
Focus | Mario Sironi in the Allaria Collection
The recent deposit of the Allaria Collection confirms Mart’s commitment to host and valorize works of art from private collections, integrating them harmoniously into the context of the museum and its collections.
The substantial group of drawings and paintings by Sironi assembled during the postwar era by Antonio Allaria enriches the series of the painter’s works from previous deposits such as the Domenico Talamoni, VAF-Stiftung and Romana Sironi Collections.
Through approximately 100 works, of which more than 60 by Mario Sironi, divided into nine thematic sections, the Focus exhibition dedicated to the Allaria Collection explores the friendship born in Cortina in 1947 between the collector and the artist, revealing a private Sironi, almost completely unknown to the public.
Between paintings and drawings, visitors will encounter works with a strong political content, figurative compositions bordering on abstraction, even playful and colorful drawings created for his own daughters and years later gifted to his friend Allaria on the occasion of the birth of his daughter, Alessandra.
Generally, however, the majority of Sironi’s works in the Allaria Collection belong to the hardest years in the artist’s life, the period following the Second World War, marked by the death of his wife and one of his daughters and by the hostility of the critics, who saw in him an old artist of the Fascist regime. A grim atmosphere reverberates in the the landscapes from this period, dominated by the dark shadows and leaden tones of an eternal twilight. Many of the works feature mountains as the central subject, which stand dark and massive on the horizon, their silhouettes seemingly carved from thick, clay-like impastos.
It is nearly always an ideal, timeless mountain, but which in some cases reveals a specific reference to the peaks around Cortina, like the Tofane and the Becco di Mezzodì.
The architectural ruins painted by Sironi during these years are populated by characters that recall defeated heroes, titans crushed by the weight of the buildings, or suffocated by a landscape. Figures emerge from the darkness, stiffened in chalky colored pastes, roughly sketched like giant stone idols, entombed in their niches or struggling to escape from these cramped spaces.
As the Director and President of Mart writes in the catalogue of the exhibition: “Also of great importance is the fact that the largest part of the Collection presented by Mart with a temporary exhibition [...] is focused on the work of Mario Sironi, one of the most important Italian artists of the 20th century and representative of an era which, despite its proven significance, still merits further critical and scientific study, which remains inadequate with respect to the importance of a generation that expressed the crisis of their own time with gestures that cannot be reduced to a purely ideological viewpoint, and that should be reframed with greater historical awareness”.
The exhibition places Sironi’s works in a dialogue with those of other artists collected by Allaria, such as Morandi and Picasso. More specifically, the exhibition focuses on the presence in the Collection of three great artists with whom Allaria enjoyed close friendship: Renato Guttuso, Anton Zoran Mušič and Graham Vivian Sutherland. These works are then integrated with works from the Mart collections and its permanent installations. The dialogue between new and old guests, selected in terms of thematic coherency, once again distinguishes the entire itinerary of the Rovereto museum.