50/100 Mart Collections

"Suburb with camion" by Mario Sironi is a dark and claustrophobic corner of town that gives an impression of closure despite representing a scene of urban life.

The piece portrays a static, metaphysical and timeless city, contrary to any illusion of progress.

This work is part of a series of paintings on the same subject, which a review from the time described as follows: “housing blocks, edifices, industrial buildings, workers’ lodgings, either lined up in rows or looming over the suburbs, lapping at a countryside dazed by whistles at dusk, and blackened by a smoke-filled sky”.

Back in the 1960s, Aldo Tagliaferro dedicated his research to the critical documentation of the social and political reality of the time.

Cities were the most common place of inquiry, and the objective medium of photography often represented one of the best means to document them.

Almost like a film montage, the city is broken down into images of places, people, symbols and monuments. The result is a collection of concepts, silently coming together to determine both the urban space and the life contained within it.

Fortunato
Depero’s fantastic imagination flows into this large tapestry, created in 1920
for the publisher Umberto Notari at the Casa d’Arte in Rovereto.

In this particular piece, a giant doll dominates a playful, rhythmic procession composed of moustached masks with huge clubs, shields and flags.

The puppets come to life thanks to overlapping, colourful shapes that play on the revolutionary futurist idea of decomposition and recomposition of forms.

The
Trentino-born artist Benvenuto Disertori – who moved to Umbria in 1911 – tells
the art critic Vittorio Pica what fascinates him most about Perugia, a medieval
town in central Italy: “It felt like I had unearthed the beating soul,
austerity and grace of Dante’s time”.

A great experimenter with engraving techniques, Disertori uses clear, severe symbols in this etching, thereby encapsulating the city’s ancient, solitary soul.

“Erasure is an essential building block. It’s like the number zero in mathematics – it’s needed to form all numbers and values”.
Emilio Isgrò uses the absolute and revolutionary action of erasure in his works, which he defines as “a form of creative destruction”.

Often working in the pages of books, newspapers and posters, said erasure also made its way onto maps and globes. No longer oriented by place names, the observer is left to construct his or her own geography.

Mario Tozzi depicts a thoughtful woman resting in a cluttered room. As the title suggests, the woman in question is the artist’s wife.

The way the image is composed, with the woman in the centre – allowing the shape of her body to stand out – permits us to catch a glimpse of various objects in the room, such as a book, a table, a tablecloth, and a vase of flowers, which creep into the frame almost as if by chance.

The decorative patterns on the carpet, cushion and armchair seem to deconstruct the composition’s robustly Renaissance perspective, which was an important feature of Italian painting in the 1920s.