Lugano
«In the annals of contemporary art history, few names resonate with the same degree of audacity and innovation as that of Mario Schifano (1934 – 1998). It is precisely the volcanic singularity of this artist, a key figure in the Italian avant-garde of the 1960s, that presented us with a challenge we could not resist. For the first time in his long career, Schifano’s work inhabits the gallery spaces, embodying that synthesis of transversal currents that has made him famous throughout the world. This “exceptional” artistic path, which has ranged from the exuberant dynamism of Pop Art to the introspective depths of Neo-Expressionism, has fascinated the greatest scholars and curators of his time: Marco Meneguzzo is one of them. His words are perhaps those that best capture Schifano’s kaleidoscopic visions, which defy easy classification and weave a tapestry of cultural and existential meanings that seem more relevant today than ever.
At the dawn of the 1980s, a decade marked by social upheaval and artistic renaissance, his work stands out as emblematic of the fervent experimentation of the time, marking a marked departure from the pop exuberance of his early work towards a more introspective and nuanced exploration of form, texture and emotional resonance. The exhibition Schifano. Pittura felice is therefore a tribute to the ‘puma painter’ – as the writer Goffredo Parise called him – fierce and unpredictable, and to his creativity, which moves uncompromisingly between abstraction and figuration, chaos and order, gesture and geometry.»