Umberto Bignardi: A Pop Season 1959-1968
The exhibition “Umberto Bignardi – A Pop Season 1959-1968”, curated by Walter Guadagnini, presents, for the first time in Milan in many years, one of the main protagonists of the Italian Pop Art movement.
Born in Bologna in 1935, Bignardi moved to Rome in the mid-fifties, and honed his artistic language in the lively atmosphere of the capital, mainly under the tutorship of Toti Scialoja at the Academy of Fine Arts and in the company of artists like Gastone Novelli and Cy Twombly. Representing that youthful period at this exhibition is the great painting “Fiora”, of 1959, a personal interpretation of the poetics of signs and colours. There are also various works on paper of the following year, rarely seen before, that bear witness to his decisive move towards the use of images from the disparate worlds of science and mass communication. This marked the start of Bignardi’s period of greatest success, which is represented here with crucial works on canvas like “L’occhio”, “Allergeni” and “Quadro per bene”, in which it is easy to appreciate the artist’s particular interpretation of the image. Large areas of colour lend chromatic and emotional support to additions from real life and from newspapers, often American, of the time, in a dialogue in different languages emblematic of Bignardi’s line of research.
Bignardi took a definite stance and made a very personal contribution to the pop climate evolving in the capital and around the world during that period. He was one of the proponents of the so-called “Piazza del Popolo” movement. His work was discussed by the most respected critics of the time (from Maurizio Calvesi to Cesare Vivaldi and Alberto Boatto) and displayed in solo exhibitions such as those at the Galleria La Tartaruga in Rome, in 1961 and 1963, at the Galleria De’ Foscherari in Bologna, in 1964 , and the Galleria L’Attico in Rome, in 1967, as well as in collective exhibitions like “13 pittori a Roma”, in 1963, “Arte Nuova” at the Lunds Konsthall, in 1964, and finally the Venice Biennale of 1966.
On all these occasions, Bignardi‘s paintings were hung alongside his works on paper, large sheets that the artist has always considered to be as important as his reputedly greater works, and a significant selection of these is also shown at this exhibition. Some of these pieces on paper reveal the artist’s interest, from 1965, in the work of the English photographer Eadweard Muybridge and his studies of motion. They marked the final stage of Bignardi’s period of pop art and the beginning of his embracing of a world of science and technology that was to become prevalent in the following years, and that lead to his creation of visual and sound machines of extraordinary interest. At the turn of the century, Bignardi’s work returned to the attention of the public and the critics, thanks also to his participation in the most important retrospective exhibitions devoted to Pop Art in Italy: some of his canvases were, not by chance, displayed as part of the “Roma Pop City 60-67” exhibition at the MACRO in Rome, and in the “Italia Pop – L’arte negli anni del boom” exhibition at the Fondazione Magnani Rocca in Mamiano di Traversetolo
