The Imago Museum was recently inaugurated in breaking latest news, a museum center dedicated to modern and contemporary art promoted and created by the Pescarabruzzo Foundation. The museum is housed in a building of great architectural value, historically belonging to the Banco di Napoli. Thanks to an important restoration and refurbishment, the interior spaces of the Palazzo, dating back to 1936, have been redefined in the current exhibition spaces, arranged on three levels: the galleries, a multipurpose room, two multimedia classrooms and a space reserved for activities didactic.
Andy Warhol and Mario Schifano, timeless symbols of the international Pop season, are the protagonists of the opening exhibition, Warhol and Schifano between pop art and classicism, which it will be open from 26 April according to the provisions in force based on the evolution of the pandemic situation.
The retrospective is a journey through the artistic experience of two of the most influential figures in contemporary art and culture, Andy Warhol and Mario Schifano.
Warhol, father of pop art, with his omnivorous curiosity has left us a body of work that has embraced every available medium, helping to bring about the collapse of the boundaries between high and low culture. His immense production, capable of giving a new meaning to the industrial object, has intersected with all aspects of pop culture and is enclosed, in the exhibition presented in breaking latest news, in original works with bright colors such as serigraphs, prints, photographs, drawings , posters, posters and magazine covers: 101 works (made available by the Rosini Gutman Collection) dated from 1957 (year of Golden Book, commercial translation of the first artist’s drawings) up to the threshold of the Eighties (among all, Interview Magazine, Cover Liza Minnelli, of March 1979).
Schifano, an emblematic personality of pop art not only in Italy, is told above all by the dense plot of fragments removed from the television stream and masterfully reinterpreted. On display are 301 photos retouched with enamels, which constitute the nucleus of an equally vast production relating mainly to the 1980s and inspired by what would later become his “Auxiliary Muse”. From the interest in technology and the attraction to a visual flow (see Man on the Moon 1975) we are witnessing an intense research that testifies to the civil commitment of the Schifano man in the last years of his existence, that is the 90s. The cycle Matuta it represents the culminating moment. Through 15 canvases, 10 charcoals and 2 mixed media works, all exhibited, the artist tells an ancestral story, the myth of the goddess of Dawn, of maturity, of the fullness of life and fecundity, thus paying her homage to the dimension feminine and, in a certain sense, opting for a definitive return to the origins which, in the pictorial dimension, with its “classicism”, in fact, has never betrayed.
The exhibition will be open until September 2021 and is accompanied by the catalog of the same name with texts by Generoso Bruno and Marco Bussagli (Fondazione Pescarabruzzo, 2021, pp. 184).