Giacomo Balla

From his early years in Turin, where he developed his unique technique alongside the Divisionist school, to his time in Rome, where he furthered his iconic style (weaving together bright colors, strong contrasts and daring framings) and socialist principles, this exhibit charts his pioneering journey. This is the forward to his participation in Futurism, founded in 1909 by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Thanks to the solicitations of the younger student Umberto Boccioni, in 1910 Balla was among the signers of the Futurist Manifesto and of the following technical manifesto, in which he accepts the invitation to paint “the persistency of the image in the retina, the movements that multiply, warp, come in succession with vibrations in the space of the trace”. From the beginning he was committed to the analytic study of movement and, in 1913, he undergoes a complete overhaul of his style, auctioning off all of his previous paintings and declaring that “Balla is dead!”. From this point on, Balla would sign his artworks with the name 'Futurballa' instead. In 1915, Balla strikes up an important partnership with the Roveretian Fortunato Depero. Together they designed and signed the 'Manifesto of the Futuristic Reconstruction of the Universe', which marks a key moment in the development of the Futurist aesthetic. The two artists together theorized a break with pictorial tradition, reinventing the artistic landscape by working across disciplines to achieve a “total fusion in order to build the universe anew, recreating it completely”. From this moment on, Balla starts innovative experimentations in a variety of artistic disciplines; from painting to graphic design, and from fashion to theatre. His house, at first in Parioli and then in Oslavia in Rome, become a lively hotbed of creativity where his magical creations were born. The rooms of his house, entirely decorated and furnished by Balla himself, opened to the public between 1919 and 1920. Balla was reconstructing the universe by beginning with his own home. 

A scientific interest in the movement and effect of light dominates Balla’s Futuristic artworks, which he developed in the winter between 1912 and 1913 when he moved to Dusseldorf to work on the decoration of Casa Lowenstein. It was here that he realized the first works from the “Compenetrazioni iridescenti” series, in which his study of light and movement - reduced to geometric schemes of colored triangles - reaches pure abstraction.

This work is inspired by an experience Balla had in the park of Villa Borghese in 1916, just before the First World War. Reflecting on news he read in his morning newspaper (which reported a battleship arriving into Naples harbor carrying the corpse of a sailor), Balla encountered a war widow, who was covered with a dark veil and dressed in black. The impressions of the moment, including the metallic reflections of a cloud that were reminiscent of the shape of a battleship, appear in this painting of the scene, creating a dark, emotional atmosphere.

In 1918, Balla publishes the "Manifesto of Color” in the catalogue of his first solo exhibition at Casa d’arte Bragaglia in Rome. The manifesto promotes a dynamic form of painting that translates a simultaneity of forces in a “blasting painting, a surprising painting” dominated by “an explosion of color”. This exhibition also featured the series of paintings titled “Forze di paesaggio”, which bring together Balla's sense of movement and geometric form with his use of lively, flat, and opaque colors.