VERO AMORE (True Love)

Italian Pop Art from the GAM Collection

OCTOBER 31, 2017 - FEBRUARY 26, 2018    

Curated by Riccardo Passoni.

GAM of Turin, continuing its activities to enhance enjoyment and appreciation of its endowments, is unveiling a new display of the Italian Pop Art works from its collections. A selection of sixty works including paintings, sculpture and videos, this tour entitled Vero Amore (True Love), after Mario Schifano’s work of 1962, reflects on the historical aspect of Pop Art in Italy.

Pop Art emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the United States and England as a reaction of artists, mainly painters, to the visual bombardment of the new consumer society based on the predominance of advertising and mass media. The artists abandoned Arte Informale and abstract expressionism of the 1950s to embrace a new figurative movement that alluded to or cited the language of advertising. At the same time, parallel currents developed in Italy too.

The principle aspects examined by critics in recent analyses of the phenomenon include, on the one hand, a study of the news accounts of the 1960s to search for direct ties with the explosion of the American Pop Art phenomenon on Italian soil at the 1964 Venice Biennale, and on the other, to focus on the cultural background of the Italian artists, pointing to the contiguity and the distance from their international fellows.

The exhibition itinerary illustrates the different stylistic morphologies of the artists, including Franco Angeli, Mario Ceroli, Tano Festa, Giosetta Fioroni, Sergio Lombardo, Fabio Mauri, Pino Pascali, Salvatore Scarpitta and Mario Schifano. On the Piedmont side, this presentation includes works by Antonio Carena, Piero Gilardi, Aldo Mondino, Ugo Nespolo, Max Pellegrini and Michelangelo Pistoletto.

In the background, among the many other proposals on view – the presentation of important collateral results that were not Pop Art but emerged in that climate of research and development – there are examples of pioneering explorations by Mimmo Rotella and Enrico Baj.

The layout and staging of the works of Italian Pop Art is curated by Riccardo Passoni.

GAM thanks the Guido and Ettore De Fornaris Foundation and the CRT Foundation for Modern and Contemporary Art for their collaboration in enhancing the museum collections.