Departing from his earlier figurative works and engagement with Futurist ideals, Italian painter Osvaldo Licini (1894-1958) turned away from realism in 1940 and painted only abstract works from then on. His paintings from that fruitful decision engage in a surrealist language of precise lines, solid colors and pregnant signs; colors and signs that Licini viewed as expressions of energy, willpower, ideas and magic. This catalog of Licini's show at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the most comprehensive monograph of his work, marks the 60th anniversary of his death. That same year, Licini won the National Grand Prize for Painting at the 29th Venice Biennale, where he had shown 53 works--executed between 1925 and 1958--in a room of his own, mounted by Carlo Scarpa. This catalog gathers his complete works, including those displayed in that same venue 60 years prior to this 2018 show.

Published to accompany the first time the Luigi and Peppino Agrati Collection will be revealed to the public; the collection can be viewed between May and August 2018. During the Festival of Nouveau Realisme (New Realism) in Milan in November 1970, Christo removed the white cloth in which he had wrapped the Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II in the Piazza del Duomo and placed it over the Monument to Leonardo da Vinci in the Piazza della Scala. This is viewed today as a key event in the contemporary art scene in Milan, a moment that Luigi and Peppino Agrati experienced live. They immediately contacted the artist and commissioned him to create works for the garden of their villa. Wealthy entrepreneurs, the Agrati brothers shared subtle and sensitive insights into art that fostered a deep understanding of the images that shaped their era. This show is the first time their collection is being revealed to the public, through a representative selection of Italian and American works of art donated with generosity and foresight by Luigi Agrati to the Intesa Sanpaolo. From a nucleus of sculptures by Melotti to masterpieces by Fontana, Burri, and Klein, the exhibition provides an in-depth examination of Italian 'Nuova Figurazione' painting ('New Figurative Painting'), working its way to the roots of the new 'Arte Povera' ('Poor Art'). The discovery of American art coincides with the Agratis' acquisition of works by the principal exponents of Pop Art - including the iconic Andy Warhol and his monumental Triple Elvis - and by the Minimalists, of which Dan Flavin's large neon work dedicated to Peppino Agrati is emblematic. In a kind of multiple constellation side by side with examples of Italian art, the collection reveals extraordinary works by Robert Rauschenberg (acquired in large numbers from the end of the 1960s to the 1980s), Cy Twombly (the original mediator between American and Italian art), and conceptual artists like Bruce Nauman and Joseph Kosuth, whose experiments with language are displayed in a dialogue with those by Alighiero Boetti and Vincenzo Agnetti.

Published in association with the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena, this catalogue presents unpublished and remarkable photographs that will take readers on an extraordinary journey through the artistic milieu of the Venice Biennale from 1948 to 1986 featuring artists such as Leger, Ernst, Picasso, Mattisse, Dali, Fontana, Beuys, Oldenberg, Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg. In their time these photographs were featured in magazines such as Time and Life. Today, this repertory of photographs forms a remarkable contribution to the history of post-war culture. These photographs, depicting the most influential figures in modern and contemporary art, capture the artistic climate and fervour of the period in question and document the historical phases of the world's most prized international art exhibition.

A new privileged point of view and an original take on the evolution of Fontana's oeuvre through his complete graphic work. This catalogue raisonne of the works on paper by Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) is one the most complete and cutting-edge publications on the work of one of the leading protagonists of the twentieth-century's artistic development. Experimentation on paper was Fontana's chosen means to test the richness and novelty of his inspiration.
This catalogue raisonne covers four decades of this creative activity, starting with the astonishing corpus of figural works and culminating in his original invention of spatial art, which led to the creation and development of the highly individual "holes," "environments," and "slashes." The study includes extensive and heretofore unpublished documentation on Fontana's dialogue with architecture and decoration and his experimentation with unusual techniques and materials. Including more than 5,000 works executed between 1928 and 1968, with individual entries that include bibliographical and exhibition reference, this volume is an essential and updated tool for scholars, collectors, museum operators, and art dealers who wish to become thoroughly familiar with Fontana's oeuvre.