Painting is back

An exhibition about the 1980s. A new look at Italian painting through an itinerary of emblems and cases, conceived by Luca Massimo Barbero.

The exhibition reveals the transversality of the artists of that decade which, in fact, began well before the appointed dates and ended well in advance: Hence the reason for opening the exhibition with works from the late 1970s by Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Nicola De Maria and Mimmo Paladino, the protagonists of the Transavanguardia officially launched in 1979 by Achille Bonito Oliva from the pages of Flash Art, but also with those who, in the same years, were already active on the international painting scene such as Franco Angeli, Mario Schifano, Salvo, Aldo Mondino and, in its singularity, Carol Rama.

The exhibition is varied and apparently contradictory, as those years were, and alongside surprising, germinal works by Gino De Dominicis or Luigi Ontani, it proposes an unexpected Mario Merz and the then-new media of the video environment by Studio Azzurro.

In the collective memory of this decade, Milan became the symbol of a hedonistic lifestyle, but today it is presented to us as an extraordinary system in which art and fashion, design and entertainment, architecture, politics, and finance are mixed together in a true laboratory. In a climate full of energy, numerous galleries operated, ready to embrace the ferment of those years represented in this exhibition by the names of Valerio Adami, Aldo Spoldi, Mimmo Rotella and Enrico Baj, to whom a final room is dedicated with an extraordinary “graffito on canvas”.

The 57 works on display narrate just a few aspects of this creative moment, that Italian wave which also affected the younger generations and constellations of new painters, who are not represented here, but who give a signal of the unrepeatability of that moment.