Modern & Contemporary: Exhibitions

At the end of the 1960s, Bruno Marcucci from Cagli (Pesaro and Urbino) arrived at the Fine Arts Academy of Urbino, followed soon after by Bruno Mangiaterra from Loreto (Ancona). The two students did exactly what Concetto Pozzati (director of the Academy) was imagining when he wrote in 1972 “Our shared effort is to stimulate and build an interdisciplinary space […] so as to contribute to the training of the artist understood as technician/professional and ‘intellectual’”. The two artists’ works from the 1970s are highly emblematic and representative of the cultural climate that surrounded them in Urbino and the teachings they voraciously absorbed. The recent works of both artists are on view next to the first gallery, which features an homage to Pier Paolo Calzolari (the two students’ teacher at the time).

Against an entirely blank, monochrome background, ten meticulously arranged layers of metal mesh, painstakingly planned and patiently cut out by hand, create the chiaroscuro gradations that make up the faces of young women and mannequins, details of classical statuary, architectural interiors and cityscapes. 

The artist’s analytical approach to vision, which derives from his training in the graphic arts and professional experience as a photographer, led him in the early years of the new century to separate faces, bodies and natural elements into levels of light using overlapping layers of acetate and Plexiglas or strips of acetate and wood, then coming to describe his subjects, between 2007 and 2010, by cutting out a series of modules in layers of PVC mesh or incising the areas of light and shadow in paper and tulle (2014–2015). During this period, he displayed his work in London, Berlin and Amsterdam. 

With this exhibition, Brun Fine Art is exploring the avant-garde of the Cenobio group, which emerged in 1960s Milan in a fertile, international cultural climate following the crisis of Art Informel. The group’s emergence was rooted in the teachings of Lucio Fontana (1899 – 1968) and the relationships, in some cases also collaborations, between its members and Piero Manzoni (1933 – 1963). The exhibition was developed in collaboration with the studios of the living artists and the archives where their art is preserved.