Fondazione Somaini
The exhibition, entitled Beyond the Garden. Nature in the artwork of Francesco Somaini, set up in the Foundation in conjunction with the “Milan Green Week”, through a series of unpublished works, aims to highlight the artist’s great attention towards Nature throughout his entire creative activity and in especially in the 70s. Starting from this decade, Somaini began to deepen his reflection on the relationship between sculpture, architecture and the urban context, resulting in the volume co-authored with Enrico Crispolti, Urgenza nella città (1972), which includes considerations on the contrast between the natural environment and the metropolis modern. Poetics from which a series of “actions” in the landscape arise, both real and utopian.
The exhibition tackles for the first time in its complexity a topic dear to the artist from Como (1926-2005) who in the early 1950s decided to settle in the countryside in the family home, working in a small atelier, shaded by tall trees and climbing roses, which over the years is transformed into a workshop equipped with spaces reserved for the design and creation of plastic works, carried out with the original working methods gradually adopted in the years of adhesion to Concretism and Informal, to subsequent research based on reflection on the relationship between sculpture, architecture and urban context until the last season, characterized by the revival of the myth.
The exhibition itinerary, featuring around fifty works from private Italian collections, accompanied by a projection, aims to give an account of the development of his idea of Nature, covered in an aura of sacredness, of the garden and landscape conceived as ” good original place to preserve”, a source of inspiration and metaphor of beauty, through the presentation of a significant selection of works created between 1953 and 2005, including drawings, different plastic typologies (sculptures, matrices and traces) and photomontages .
The exhibition, set up in conjunction with “Milan Green Week”, revolves around the central theme of the tree, explored in different theoretical and aesthetic meanings, such as “patriarch tree” and Tree of life, which begins with drawings of tortured olive trees, exemplary arboreal model that opens to the theme of the Martyrs series of the late 1950s and early 1960s, persists in the series of Tales on the Earth of 1965, linked to the logic of the fragment of clear phytomorphic inspiration, and ends emblematically with the sheets of the Man and the Tree series from recent years. In the course of his creative activity, the artist reflects on the relationship between sculpture, architecture and urban context, resulting in the volume co-authored with Enrico Crispolti, Urgenza nella città of 1972, which includes considerations on the contrast between the natural environment and the modern metropolis, anticipating some themes addressed by Gilles Clément in the Manifesto of the Third Landscape, already a topic in-depth by Fulvio Irace in Somaini and Milan in 2022.
A poetic original, that of Somaini, which leads to the creation of sculptures such as the Urban Landscapes series of 1971-73 and continues with the proposal starting from the mid-1970s of Matrici and Tracce, which probe the formal opportunities offered by the treatment of the positive-negative – the subject of urban redevelopment competitions and installations that take us back to the legendary time of the formation of the territory, in cities such as Arcevia, Como, Mantua, Milan, Duisburg, Düsseldorf and Paris, and of actions carried out in botanical gardens – and yes concludes with the large bas-relief of the Bacchae in the forest from 1988. The latter work in which the sculptor returns to explore the myth and the human figure, abandoned with adherence to abstraction starting from the formative years.
The exhibition, curated by Emanuele Greco, Luisa Somaini and Chiara Rampoldi, is accompanied by a catalogue, published by Electa, with texts by the curators and a critical anthology.
Opening hours
Thursday, Friday, Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Entrance for visitors in via Cassolo, in front of street number 3.
Tickets
Free admission, by reservation only: call to +39 02 583 117 07 or write to fondazione.somaini@gmail.com.
Groups
The Foundation also organizes curator-led visits for organized groups. For information and reservations: call +39 02 583 117 07 or write to fondazione.somaini@gmail.com.
“[…] Here I live in the countryside among many books and magazines and the changing shape of leaves, of plants, animal life: a climate that is very beneficial to my research and my character but
Francesco Somaini to Simone Frigerio, minuta autografa databile al 1952, Archivio Francesco Somaini
which also has its limits […]”