Ninety works from art collector Peggy Guggenheim's collection will go on display starting Saturday at her eponymous gallery in Venice.
The exhibition curated by Luca Massimo Barbero titled Postwar Era: A Recent History includes homages to Jack Tworkov and Claire Falkenstein and runs through April 4.
The art spans the immediate postwar period, with works such as Richard Pousette-Dart's 1947 oil on linen The Atom, One World, depicting the nightmare of the mushroom cloud that had hit the world scene just two years prior, through the 1970s, including a 1975 work by Falkenstein, most famous for creating a "gate without matter" made of glass and iron that stands at the entrance to the gallery's home in Venice's Ca' dei Leoni.
This is "Peggy's world", made up of the works that she collected or donated to the collection, weaving together paintings, sculptures and drawings by famous names - De Kooning, Motherwell, Vedova, Afro, Fontana - with others whom the market hasn't elevated to the same status but who nonetheless represent protagonists in art history from the second half of the last century.
The exhibition unfolds in a floor plan of 11 rooms, some monographic (Carlo Ciussi, Mirko Basaldella), offering a reading on American and European art, including Italian art, from the postwar era through 1979. Rather than simply grouping the works according to movements or artistic tendencies, the exhibition joins them based on theme, style, and affinity.
"It's a journey through curiosity," Barbera said.
The exhibition opens with the dawn of abstract expressionism as it developed in the United States, giving space to a series of portraits by Tworkov, who had his studio next to De Kooning's in New York.
It then moves to the Italians - Vedova, Santomaso, Consagra, Scaloja, Carla Accardi, just to name a few - before returning to American and British art with Chadwick, Armitage, Paolozzi, Sutherland, and Davie. Then comes Mirko, an artist from the Friuli region who was the focal point for Italian art in the United States in the 1960s.
The exhibition concludes with Falkenstein, a sort of alchemist of glass and iron, with whom Guggenheim had a profound lifelong friendship.
This year is even more "the year of Peggy" given that in November the collection will host an homage to Tancredi, the Venetian artist who took his life in the Tiber River in 1964, who had close ties to Guggenheim.
First though, in April, comes Imagine 1960-1969, the birth in nine years of a new image of Italian art.
Both of these exhibitions will also be curated by Barbero.
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