The exhibition “L’arte libera. Il Futurismo italiano dalla collezione di Gianni Mattioli” (Free art. The Italian Futurism from the Gianni Mattioli Collection), sponsored and supported by the Italian Embassy in Moscow in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institutes in Moscow and St Petersburg, will be inaugurated at the Puškin Museum of Fine Arts in the Russian capital on 18 October.
The inauguration was preceded, on 13 October, by a Preview hosted by Ambassador Giorgio Starace at Villa Berg, seat of the Italian Embassy in Moscow, of one of the most prestigious works in the collection, the ‘Portrait of the painter Frank Haviland’ by Amedeo Modigliani.
The exhibition, also realised thanks to the financial support of Sberbank, will be open to the public from 19 October to 16 January 2022. It represents the climax of the ambitious project to celebrate the Italy-Russia Year of Museums that has brought to Russia one of the most significant private Italian collections of 20th-century art. The collection consists of 26 works of inestimable value, which have become true icons of Italian Futurism. After St. Petersburg (with a different arrangement at the Russian State Museum) and Moscow, the artworks will forever leave the world museum circuit.
The works will be on display at the Puškin Museum of Fine Arts in the Art Gallery rooms of European and American Countries of 19th-20th Century, where the permanent collection is hosted. This choice is representative of the interesting contrastive approach the project is intended to take. The exhibition includes Balla, Boccioni, Severini, Sironi, Carrà and Morandi – to name but a few of the artists selected by Gianni Mattioli – in the context of the European avant-garde, bringing out the points of contact, but also of rejection, between the poetics of Italian Futurism and other contemporary movements.
The exhibition “L’arte libera. Il Futurismo italiano dalla collezione di Gianni Mattioli” allows visitors to explore an extraordinary season of European circulation of ideologies and artistic experimentation and to discover a further significant historical interpretation of the intense cultural relationship that has always linked Italy and Russia.
