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Brun Fine Art invites you to visit the online viewing room and exhibition Mangiaterra and Marcucci: Urbino Origins. The online exhibition forms a virtual companion to the physical exhibition held at Raphael's birthplace, the Casa Raffaello in Urbino (24 October - 13 December).
In the year marking the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death, the exhibition Mangiaterra Marcucci. Dal principio urbinate will be held in Urbino in the museum housed in Raphael’s childhood home. Promoted by the Accademia Raffaello and the Fondazione ARL, the exhibition is sponsored by the Accademia di Belle Arti, Urbino, the Region of Marche and the City di Urbino. In view of its new cultural policy, Brun Fine Art is also contributing to this important local institutional initiative, curated by Alberto Mazzacchera. The exhibition catalogue and all of the works in the show can be viewed below.
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The foundation of the Fine Arts Academy of Urbino, the first in Marche, in 1967 was a formidable, wide-ranging advance on the front of educational modernisation in the artistic disciplines. This took place in one of the cities symbolic of the Italian Renaissance, hometown of Raphael (1483 – 1520) and crossroads of the greatest artists of the time.
Writing about the first decade of the academy’s life, Toni Toniato, who had experienced it as an instructor, observed that “the Urbino Academy was, in the alternate turbulence of the protest and of the post-protest, a utopia in large part brought to fruition, since the imagination had risen at that time to govern the Urbino Academy, as a form of the power of artistic creativity itself”.
At the end of the 1960s, Bruno Marcucci from Cagli (Pesaro and Urbino) arrived at the Academy, 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).
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Bruno Mangiaterra
Two years ago, Bruno Mangiaterra’s work was leading the oblivious viewer into a dense cane thicket, to then enter a monochrome forest. An engaging journey that he structured with his works, his mind turned to the forest’s ancient meaning as sacred and religious, its symbolic breadth and its having once been an esoteric labyrinth. Now the artist’s paintings offer a new gripping narrative with various points of contact with the first work by the alchemist bishop Jean-Albert Belin, Les aventures du philosophe inconnu en la recherche et l'invention de la pierre philosophale, published in 1646. One day, after an incredible but unsuccessful journey in search of the philosopher’s stone, of hidden knowledge, the young main character goes “all alone into a wood” with a philosophy book. Suddenly, thanks to indubitable prior tests of love for knowledge, a “lady full of majesty” appears before him. It is Wisdom personified, who allows him to feed from one of her alabaster breasts, which she says is a fountain of science with the scope of “instructing and freeing the spirit from error”. Wisdom explains, in three discourses on the Stone, that although “the secret to making it is obtained through continuous reasoning”, the fact remains that “generally speaking, men enjoy approaching the sciences in a superficial way”, since “out of a thousand scholars, very few seek the depths”. The Stone is, therefore, within the reach of “men who are men – which is to say those who want to think”.
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It is no accident that Pierre Restany described Mangiaterra in 1990 as “a superb humanist of the late quattrocento”, specifying “You believed yourself to be conceptual since the desire to know, investigate, reflect, desecrate, transform pushed you to do, to delve into knowledge and science, philosophy and politics. At certain times, you were almost maniacally excited by gestural expressiveness, but the anti-modern equivalence that you always wanted to place between weight of work and weight of the person led you down a path of mystic asceticism.”
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Next to these we find the series of Palinsegni, the fruit of technical expertise, refined dosage, able alchemies, signs that are never accidental but always dominated and composed with meticulous, sophisticated sonority. The process, resulting from long experience, makes it possible to bring to the surface the underlying signs fixed in the acrylic paint layer giving breadth to the work. In recent years, the palette of the Palinsegni, once dominated by blacks and grey with occasional light, whitish striations, has been becoming richer. What has come of it is a successful body of work that stands out on blue, green and yellow backgrounds. In some cases, the composition, in its rarefication, has begun to amalgamate around a formal structure, entirely new but of considerable interest, that sometimes begins to outline an imaginary city map, almost a labyrinth of the mind that the gaze gets tangled up in or in which the eye starts running towards hypothetical exits.
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Marcucci’s creative path follows orderly stages. Certain passages developed first around the edges of the Icebergs now open up to what has been recently increasingly taking shape as a series of works in absolute black, with incised, sometimes crinkled, vibrant surfaces, as if crossed over by a slow but powerful internal magmatic motion. When we find ourselves before paintings emerging from this same theme but apparently in a sidereal black, as soon as the eye gets accustomed to moving quickly to search in this case for the incisions of the pictorial gestures, the surface expands towards the depths of the primordial abysses: letting ourselves be sucked down, abandoning ourselves, we enter another passage in the infinite spaces of the psyche.
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Works on Show
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Bruno Mangiaterra, Untitled, 1970
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Bruno Mangiaterra, Untitled, 1970
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Bruno Mangiaterra, Sottovuoto, 1972
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Bruno Mangiaterra, Cuscino - cuore di piombo, 1972
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Bruno Mangiaterra, Al volo, 1973
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Bruno Marcucci, Untitled, 1972
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Bruno Marcucci, Untitled, 1973
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Bruno Marcucci, Sedimento vetrocamera, 1975
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Bruno Marcucci, Sedimento vetrocamera, 1975
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Bruno Marcucci, Untitled, 1976
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Bruno Mangiaterra, Omaggio a P. P. Calzolari Zero Rose, 2017
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Bruno Mangiaterra, La Scuola di Atene II, 2020
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Bruno Mangiaterra, La Scuola di Atene I, 2020
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Bruno Mangiaterra, La Scuola di Atene III, 2020
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Bruno Mangiaterra, Untitled, 2019
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Bruno Mangiaterra, Untitled, 2019
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Bruno Mangiaterra, Untitled, 2019
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Bruno Mangiaterra, Untitled, 2019
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Bruno Mangiaterra, Untitled, 2019
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Bruno Mangiaterra, Untitled, 2019
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Bruno Mangiaterra, Untitled, 2019
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Bruno Mangiaterra, Untitled, 2019
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Bruno Mangiaterra, Untitled, 2019
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Bruno Mangiaterra, Untitled, 2019
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Bruno Mangiaterra, memoria poesia filosofia, 2019
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Bruno Mangiaterra, Elegia delle pietre, 2020
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Bruno Marcucci, Iceberg, 2019
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VIRTUAL EXHIBITION
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For price enquiries and any further information, please contact us at:
info@brunfineart.com
+44 7495 745504