LONDON. Music, poetry, drawing and sculpture intertwine in Fausto Melotti’s life like an infinite symphony, which from the end of the 1920s until his death in 1986 plays light and ironic on the European cultural panorama. Born in Rovereto, Melotti moved to Milan after a brief stop in Florence and trained at the Brera Academy after studying electrical engineering. Painter, sculptures, skilled pianist, it is impossible to enclose him in a precise definition that is not simply “artist”. A friend of Fontana and Gio Ponti, his work began to be appreciated in the 1960s thanks to his subtle sculptures in bronze, copper and ceramic and to his style that fascinated European collectors.
A pioneer of Italian Modernism, in London the Hauser & Wirth gallery in Savile Row, the iconic street of tailors in Mayfair, is now celebrating it with an exhibition entirely dedicated to his passion for the theater. Simply entitled “Theater”, it is curated by Saim Demircan and collects up to 20 April more than thirty works including drawings, sculptures and archive materials. In the foreground the performing arts, which throughout his career serve as inspiration for his works and will lead him to sketch scenographies then brought to the stage in the early 1980s: his very personal light and subtle forms in bronze, copper and metal in “From Shakespeare” of 1977 and in “Madame X” of 1982, while ceramic is the protagonist of the famous Teatrini, small theatrical sets inhabited by figurines with human features with absurd elements of a dreamlike dimension, such as “Le Mani” (1949) , or «Buonanotte, Bambini» (1984) depicting a group of figures sitting on a sand background.
The theatrical dimension is also evoked by the gigantic niche that houses the works, shaped like a mouth by the masks of the Greek theater, built for the London gallery by the English artist Aaron Angell. To accompany us in the itinerary of the exhibition, the archive photos of the productions on which Melotti worked at the end of his career, including costumes and sets for “Le chant du rossignol” on the occasion of the 45th Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in 1982, with photographs from set of «Belfagor» at the Municipal Theater of Pistoia.
The «Theater» exhibition brings Melotti back to the London stage showing an unprecedented aspect, after the success of the artist’s last retrospective in 2019 at the Estorick Collection in Islington.
