Where and when
The curator Giuseppe Appella in dialogue with Carlo Sisi and Serena De Dominicis.
Introduced by Gloria Manghetti.
In collaboration with the Gabinetto Scientifico Letterario G.P. Vieusseux.
Protagonist of the collections of the Museo Novecento, Antonietta Raphaël Mafai is remembered by her daughters as a mysterious and fascinating woman artist, tough and inflexible, affectionate and at the same time distant and distant. Invincible”.
Through the presentation of the general catalog of sculpture, curated by Giuseppe Appella with the collaboration of Bruna Fontana, Umberto Allemandi editions, it will be possible to retrace the stages of the sculptural production of one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, dating back to the years between 1933 and 1971. The result of a long search among scattered and heterogeneous sources (including photographs, slides, catalogs, letters, diaries), the volume definitively clarifies doubts and inconsistencies relating to dating and attributions.
From the catalog emerge the multifaceted culture and hybrid identity on which the work of Antonietta Raphaël is grafted, sensitive to biblical and mythological themes and to the feminine, with particular reference to the motif of creation and motherhood. The volume testifies the evolution of Antonietta Raphaël’s very personal creative path, restoring all the vitality of an original creation whose power emerges clearly in the photographic tables and in the technical sheets, as well as in the full-bodied chapter in which the analysis of her work is intertwined to that
critical reception and biographical events, documented by the covers of catalogs and excerpts from letters and diaries.
Giuseppe Appella he is an art historian and curator. He was director of MUSMA, the sculpture museum of Matera, and is active as a promoter of exhibitions and important editorial initiatives.
Serena De Dominicis she is an art historian and independent critic. She has long been editor of the magazine “Arte e Critica” and is the author of numerous articles in catalogs and sector magazines relating to the contemporary art scene and the figure of Antonietta Raphaël. He currently collaborates with the Mafai Raphaël Study Center in Rome.
Carlo Sisi he was President of the Marino Marini Museum in Florence and Director of the Gallery of Modern Art and the Costume Gallery of Palazzo Pitti, where, alongside his activity as curator, he undertook to promote, through exhibitions and other initiatives, the knowledge of art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He oversaw the entire rearrangement of the same Gallery, with the edition of the general catalog. He is the author of important volumes and essays of an interdisciplinary nature.