Je Suis L'Autre at the Baths of Diocletian
JE SUIS L’AUTRE
September 28, 2018 — January 20, 2019
Je suis l’autre. Giacometti, Picasso and the Others. Primitivism in Twentieth-Century Sculpture presents the public with eighty works, including the sculptures of some of the greatest twentieth-century masters and masterpieces of ethnic art.
The exhbition, promoted by the Museo Nazionale Romano, directed by Daniela Porro, and by the Museo delle Culture di Lugano together with Electa, is curated by Francesco Paolo Campione with Maria Grazia Messina.
The exhibition catalog published by Electa, curated by Francesco Paolo Campione and Maria Grazia Messina, contains a number of essays and a rich anthology on the “primitive arts” as seen by the artists and intellectuals of the twentieth century. The catalog offers a broad and well-documented multifocal vision of the meanings and the values of the works on display and, more in general, of the theme of Primitivism in twentieth-century art.
The exhibition is conceived as a journey through themed areas, corresponding to the main features of the inner exploration that twentieth-century artists had in common with the non-Western cultures that burst onto the scene in the late nineteenth century with a revolutionary result.
Primitivism interested in particular the sculpture of the first half of the twentieth century: a fatal meeting which found that its primary fundament lay in the material itself. At the same time, it was a liberation that forever released Western sculpture from the conformity of the features of the face and the form of the body forever.
The artists whose works are exhibited include Karel Appel, Hans Arp, Kenneth Armitage, Georges Braque, Serge Brignoni, Agustín Cárdenas, Lynn Chadwick, André Derain, Jean Dubuffet, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, Alberto Giacometti, Julio González, Henry Heerup, Ludwig Ernst Kirchner, Yves Klein, Jacques Lipchitz, Man Ray, André Masson, Joan Miró, Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, Pablo Picasso, Germaine Richier, Salvatore Scarpitta, Fritz Wotruba, Enrico Baj, Mirko Basaldella, Adriana Bisi Fabbri, Alik Cavaliere, Pietro Consagra, Roberto Crippa, Agenore Fabbri, Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Marino Marini, Luciano Minguzzi, Costantino Nivola, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Regina [Cassolo Bracchi], Raffaello A. Salimbeni, Gaston Chaïssac, Francesco Toris.
Exhibition Preview
Sculpture depicting an ancestor Oceania. Melanesia. New Guinea. Lake Sentani. Eastern area. Village of Asei. Late 19th century. Wood and pigment, 122×22,5×23 cm Lugano, MUSEC –Brignoni Collection