Lorenzelli Arte is pleased to present Back to the future: an invitation to look back to the past for a better look and understanding of the future. The exhibition aims to demonstrate and examine the enormous influence - rarely stated - that many of the artists on display have had, and still have. Some of them represented the essence of their time, such as Mario Radice and Ronnie Cutrone, whose works sharply render the atmosphere and artistic trends of their historical period.
Other artists, however, such as Günter Fruhtrunk, Enrico Castellani, Piero Dorazio, and Dadamaino, created timeless works, works that could have been made in any decade, thanks to their inherent universality. The same is true of Pavel Mansurov, a Soviet artist who, in the Leningrad of 1922, seemed almost to anticipate certain artistic concepts that would be characteristic, instead, of the 1960s. Artists such as Rodolfo Aricò and Claudio Cintolimade, perhaps unwittingly, a significant revolution in the concept of painting and the pictorial surface. Franco Grignani and Mario Nigro elevated graphic art to true art. These are just a few names of the artists on display in the exhibition.
All these artists, although very different from each other, have in common that they have left a profound and indelible mark on the history of art. They also have in common the fact that they were perhaps little, certainly less, congenial to the market system, to speculation, and for this reason victims of oblivion or at least obfuscation. Many of them, like Dorazio or Gérard Schneider, have only recently begun to get the attention they deserve.
The intent of the exhibition is to show how the authenticity of an artistic message can transcend time and space, how it can go beyond market dynamics, and how much of what we see today and is proposed to us as a total "novelty," actually has roots in the past, but this past is often unstated and in many cases ignored. We aim to have the public rediscover the importance of these artists and demonstrate how their contributions are still relevant today.
