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.

Franco Angeli was one of the leading figures in the Italian art of the post-war period. Often labelled superficially as Pop, he is revealed here, through new documents and studies, as an artist who took a surprising and unprecedented approach to his work. He made his debut in the fifties in a still little-known experimental Roman laboratory where the new generations encountered the masters of Italian art.This book reconstructs the stylistic and artistic reciprocities and the relations of Angeli with his friends and colleagues up until the sixties, a time when, with his attainment of an existential image that was at the same time deeply polemical and provocative, his work developed along versatile lines, in an original dialogue with the international context.

Tornabuoni art returns to the origins of sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro's work (1926, Morciano di Romagna), specifically to the years 1956-1965, a pivotal period of the artist's production. His creations, initially derived from the goldsmithing produced side by side with the brothers Gio and Giorgio Perfetti, evolves towards small concrete and lead reliefs, then in large mural panels engraved with illegible glyphs, inspired by Mesopotamian tablets' cuneiform writing, Egyptian papyruses and Paul Klee's graphic style. In 1960, Pomodoro was among the founders of the group Continuita, next to Novelli, Consagra, Tancredi, Dorazio and Fontana, preaching an 'aesthetic of continuity', defined as 'the absence, the incertitude of limit' and attached to the formal aspects of artworks. He thus produced his first Sfere, adopting gilded polished bronze as his preferred material of work, and of which the creation marks the definitive transition to monumental scale of his career. Today, Pomodoro's creations can be found in prestigious museum collections such as the Guggenheim in New York and the Vatican Museums. Moreover, his monumental artworks are exhibited in more than 40 public squares in major cities around the world. The artist lives and works in Milan, Italy. Text in English and Italian.

An extraordinary selection of works and a lavish set of illustrations reconstruct in an intimate and thorough way the brief but dazzling trajectory, between creative output and unbridled emotion, followed by Tancredi Parmeggiani, a great exponent of postwar Italian art. From his academic debut to the lyrical colorism of the early days, and from the experimentation typical of nonrepresentational spatialism to his period of gestural abstractionism, culminating in the visionary aesthetics of the sixties and characterised by uneasy and tormented figurations, this book reconstructs all the phases of his career.

A seminal experience on the Italian art scene of the 1960s. At the height of the economic miracle of the 1960s, artistic experiments in Italy kept following one another, mixed and merged with an extraordinary speed and intensity.The common aim was to emerge from the disillusionment of the postwar period to build a new vocabulary of signs and images, able to restore the ferment of society and contemporary culture. The book is dedicated to the propositional wealth of that decade, based on a new perspective on the Italian art of those years.The artists represented include Franco Angeli, Domenico Gnoli, Giosetta Fioroni, Tano Festa, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Mario Schifano, creators of a new and original direction that typified Italian art in that period, of which the book offers ideas, studies, and curiosities.

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.

Lucio Fontana (1899-1968), is universally acknowledged as one of the foremost figures in the generation of artists who, in the 1950s and '60s, helped bring about a radical conceptual and linguistic change in contemporary art. The role he played was explored by scholars and critics in the early years of the post-war period, and his work constituted a model for the younger generation of artists in Europe. In the past two decades, Fontana has achieved significant international renown. The essays in this catalogue by Enrico Crispolti, Luca Massimo Barbero, Caterina Toschi and Piero Dorazio offer insights into the origins and characteristics of Spatialism, the artistic movement Fontana founded, which synthesised colour, sound, space, movement, and time into a new type of art. Text in English and Italian.

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.