Bambini's Collection

Massimo Campigli is an artist with a double life. Born in Berlin to a very young German mother, who long disguised her state even in the eyes of her son, his real name was Max Ihlenfeldt. Even from early childhood, however, he lived in Florence. Italy would always be his country of choice, despite the many and varied trips that would take him to Paris for a long time, in two distinct periods. Famous for his inventions of metaphysical character, in which appear series of stylized women and girls, with vague Etruscan or archaic Greek feelings, he aims to form a kind of pattern that lives on the variations of the individual elements. Campigli has in fact two fundamental qualities: an ability to stylize and a musicality in his composition. This gives him an important and strongly distinguished role in Italian painting between the wars and the post-war period. In the work that we admire here, the large carafe is resolved in a slightly cubist way, partly because it is mirrored by the smaller vase. The still life is expressed on the basis of essential lines, which break down the planes of vision and make it real. The author’s ability of synthesis is seen in every detail, but especially in the drafting of the same flowers, which are transformed into geometric groupings capable of offering a profound balance to the design.

In the post-war period, the Istrian Hollesch carried out a very personal research based on Venetian art, interpreted however in a surrealist and expressionist way thanks to an expository freshness that earned him the participation in some Art Biennials. Starting from a fictitious, almost magical realism, the artist soon arrives at a fantastic conception that sees the features of things dissolve into a magma of colors capable of assuming particular material value. This also happens in the work here, where the reflections of the lagoon city are transformed into a rhythmic series of elements, with an intense and happy impact, which unite the distant beauty of the buildings with the arched underscores of the gondolas and the crooked lines of the red piers that sink their roots into the omnipresent liquid element, the triumph and ruin of Venice.

Appel was a prominent exponent of the CoBrA movement, called so by the names of the European capitals in which this group of artists mainly worked: Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam. In fact, it was a pictorial current that followed the dictates of expressionism in the post-war period, but it expanded into less anguished, very lively, bizarre and, in a certain sense, joyful visions. Appel, in particular, created works in which the surviving figuration evolves into brightly colored shapes, which often give rise to fantastic creatures. So it happens in this case, where the author's hand draws with great force, using only black and red, the features of a character almost from a fairy tale. Our attention tends to unite these lines and these commas, composing a face and a body. In this way, we are transported to a different world: an expressive reality that does not follow the contradictory evolution of European society. And so it represents the counterpoint.

A painter solidly educated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, he took part in 15 Venice Biennials. Exponent of a realism lit by strong colors and an expressionist interpretation of the tract, he had a solid reputation in Italy and abroad. Very well known in the post-war period for his landscapes characterized by the appearance of a great reddish or rosy sun, which is repeated several times under different skies, he was a very flexible master able to span all artistic techniques, obtaining for example particularly happy results in the field of fresco. In the work presented here, the still life is firmly set on a large table on which appears a multicolored tablecloth, which then leaves room for the appearance of a species of great demijohn. The background is characterized by the typical red of Saetti, embellished with yellowish brushstrokes that thicken in the upper part. It is therefore the work of a very interesting author, who always refused to fully embrace abstractionism, being better able to interpret the taste of Italian figuration.

Giosetta Fioroni, born into a family of artists, with a mother who deeply loved marionettes, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome and participated since a young age in the cultural climate of the capital that, particular in the sixties, was also a crossroads of foreign masters, passing or permanent visitors, many of whom come from the United States. That was the period of the birth of pop art and also the development of a particular Italian pop art. Giosetta Fioroni, linked in her life by intense and reciprocated love for the writer Goffredo Parise, initially distinguished herself in the elaboration of photographs that were transformed into icons suggestive of style or fashion. She further worked to reach a singular mythic association between the written text and the image. The work we admire here shows us a sort of pointed mountain or of unformed matter, evidently also imbued with notes. On the other hand, the title "Dancing in the dark" could allude to a famous American song. Finally, the mountain ends with the top of a New York skyscraper. This creates a world apart, as the artist did in her famous theaters, where the imagination returns to play a preponderant role, freed from all formal suggestion.