21 Dec 2021 – 5 Jun 2022

Vinicio Berti

Curated by

Eva Francioli and Sergio Risaliti

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Where and when

From

21December 2021

To

5June 2022

Museo Novecento

After the conference AVANTI POPOLO!  held last summer between Palazzo Vecchio and Museo Novecento, the celebrations for the 100th anniversary of the birth of Vinicio Berti continue under the banner of the tribute with which we intend to pay homage to the famous Florentine master: for the occasion, in fact, an exceptionally ideal triptych, the subject of a restoration completed precisely for the current exhibition.

Exhibition Hours

Monday – Sunday

11:00 am

8:00 pm

Thursday

Through the selection of three unreleased paintings from 1951, it is now possible to shed new light on a particularly delicate phase of the artist’s personal and professional life, who in those months begins to face a strictly individual path, leaving behind the militant season of collective struggles, conducted together with the comrades of the Classical Abstraction group.

The paintings, made in mixed media on hardboard, are shown as panels of an ideal triptych, which guides the viewer in a tale of anguish and redemption. The narrative starts from Construction of total reality, an ’empty scene’ in which the dense visual geometries draw inhospitable and hostile landscapes and our gaze cannot penetrate.

We are called to walk the tight succession of linear elements in search of a light and a glimmer, but the ideally built environment appears saturated and our wandering constantly hindered. In contrast to this construction, the emergence of figures in the front panel, entitled Human Presences. As in a short circuit, typified and abstracted reality welcomes, like apparitions, images of a woman with a child rendered with an incisive, almost expressionist stroke. True contemporary piety, these figures insert a narrative element into the composition that almost seems to clash with the unspeakable constructiveness of the red and black signs of an abstract matrix.

Only the communist utopia, which has always guided Vinicio Berti’s research, appears, despite its painful contradictions, a beacon in the complexity of daily life. This is how the great hammer and sickle, at the center of the work Symbol of Truth, can be considered an ideal completion of Berti’s investigation into existence and society.

Artist

Vinicio Berti

Florence, 1921-1991

Curated by

Eva Francioli

Sergio Risaliti

Scientific Coordination

Francesca Neri

Press

Costanza Savelloni

Social

Giulia Spissu

Organization

Mus.e