ARCHIVIO CASORATI – Prinp Editoria d'Arte

Archivio Casorati FELICE CASORATI DESIGNER

Dario — Tue, 13 May 2025 08:24:59 +0000

The volume illustrates an unpublished aspect of the great Master of the twentieth century, “Felice Casorati Designer. Pioneer in the birth of Italian design”, in which furniture and prototypes designed by the artist are reproduced, some of which are visible to the public for the first time. The volume highlights Casorati’s influence in the field of applied arts and furniture, recognizing his role as a pioneer in the birth of Italian design.
The works presented in the volume, edited by the Casorati Archive and with a historical essay by Davide Alaimo, tell the story of the 1920s, a period during which Casorati developed a fruitful partnership with the patron Riccardo Gualino, whose commissions allowed him to experiment and put himself to the test as an “interior decorator”, architect, today we would say “designer”. Riccardo Gualino wrote in his autobiography, published in 1931: “It was an act of courage to grant carte blanche to a painter to create architecture.” In 1925, Riccardo and Cesarina Gualino entrusted Casorati with the design of the small theater in via Galliari in Turin, the furnishings of the dance school and part of his private home. It was in this period that the painter began to design chairs, stools, tables, bookcases, combining his artistic poetics with that of design, and calling the young architect Alberto Sartoris to collaborate with him in the design of the private theater. Also presented in the collection, in a completely new form, are the first projects for furniture with the dry oil on paper technique, a particular technique of Casorati, which allows an innovative reading of three-dimensional forms.

Archivio Casorati THE BEGINNING – Luisa Rabbia in dialogue with…

Dario — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 12:19:03 +0000

The volume documents the group exhibition “The Beginning” that took shape starting from two significant paintings by Brooklyn-based artist, Luisa Rabbia, “NorthEastSouthWest” (2014, Collezione Maramotti) and “Birth” (2017, Collezione Francesca Lavazza). These sizable works set the tone for the exhibition’s subsequent selections from the work of ten diverse, international artists, generously loaned from Collezione Maramotti: Huma Bhabha, Ross Bleckner, Gianni Caravaggio, Mario Diacono, Jason Dodge, Scott Grodesky, Jannis Kounellis, Piero Manzoni, Claudio Parmiggiani and Beatrice Pediconi.
“The Beginning” marks a return for the Italian-born Luisa Rabbia who emigrated to New York from Turin in 2000, and elaborates certain themes common to Rabbia’s oeuvre, touching deep chords in the human psyche regarding origin, appearance, and direction on both a terrestrial and celestial scale.
“The Beginning” took place in three locations in the village of Pavarolo, installing over twenty works of art in the Studio Museo Felice Casorati, in the adjacent garden-level rooms of Casa Casorati, and in the village’s central clock tower, all within a short stroll through this charming hill town, a twenty minute drive from Turin.
“The Beginning” is a project curated by David Dixon and Archivio Casorati, in collaboration with Collezione Maramotti (Reggio Emilia), Collezione Francesca Lavazza (Turin), Peter Blum Gallery (New York), Galleria Giorgio Persano (Turin) with the coordination of Francesca Solero.

Archivio Casorati BELDY

Dario — Sun, 05 May 2024 15:56:42 +0000

Beldy (Mabel Hardy Maugham) is an English artist, mother of Daphne Maugham Casorati, who, on the advice of Felice, whose Turin studio Daphne arrived in 1925 attracted by the portrait that the painter made of her sister Cynthia (ballerina of Alexander Sakharoff and then in Turin with Bella Hutter), began to frame his works and exhibit them in public and private spaces.
Beldy immediately emerges as an extraordinarily original artist, whose works are created using fragments and varieties of fabrics with varying textures, ranging from stretched velvet to thin scraps of crêpe de Chine. The fine fabrics used for the patchwork were given to the artist by her friend and stylist Elsa Schiaparelli, one of the “première dames” of international fashion in the 1930s, who with Coco Chanel is considered one of the most influential fashion figures in the period between the two wars.

Archivio Casorati ESTETICA DEI VISIONARI – Scipione in dialogue with…

Dario — Sun, 28 Jan 2024 16:00:10 +0000

The volume documents the exhibition “Estetica dei visionari” (Aesthetics of Visionaries), an exhibition which takes its title from the essay “Esthétique des visionnaires” (1926) by Henri Focillon and presents works by Amber Andrews, Charles Avery, Srijon Chowhdury, Alessandro Fogo, David Horváth, Margherita Manzelli, Wangechi Mutu and Scipione. The concept of visionaryness distinguishes all the artists in the catalogue: a trait understood as the ability to look beyond sensible reality, an almost prophetic gift that pushes them beyond the visible, to explore the deepest feelings of man.
The combination between the spatial and temporal investigation of reality and the intimate and profound, almost magical experience that derives from it, finds its perfect home in the village of Pavarolo, perched between the hills of Turin and the colors of uncontaminated nature, in particularly in the home and studio of Felice Casorati.
In the Master’s studio, the most visionary works of Scipione, such as his Self-portrait (1930) and the Prophet with a view to Jerusalem (1930) – created in the last years of his life and shortly before the publication of Focillon’s text – dialogue with some works from great imaginative charge, creating a path of connected visions that cross the last decades of the history of Art: the empiricist thinker of Charles Avery who, placing the source of knowledge in experience, becomes a cast, plaster, tangible presence and testimony of a vision concrete; a large canvas by Margherita Manzelli which, through a female figure, insinuates itself into mental spaces beyond reality to the deepest sensitivity of those who observe it; the collages of Wangechi Mutu where the female body, a place of political and cultural clash, becomes a medium of a mythical message in which good wins over evil; and again the works of Alessandro Fogo, capable of blending contemporary painting and suspended narratives, leading us towards visions beyond the simple two-dimensionality of the canvases.
The dialogue between the twentieth century and the contemporary is then amplified through the works of three artists represented by the Ciaccia Levi gallery: Amber Andrews, Srijon Chowdhury and David Horváth investigate visionary universes of everyday life with personal accents that have roots in the history of art.
The exhibition was organized by the Municipality of Pavarolo, in collaboration with the Casorati Archive and the Iannaccone Collection, with the coordination of Francesca Solero.

Archivio Casorati FRANCESCO CASORATI – OLTRE LO SPECCHIO

Dario — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 15:55:49 +0000

Ten years after the passing of Francesco Casorati (1934-2013), the Studio Museo Felice Casorati of Pavarolo pays homage to the famous Turin artist – son of the great master of the twentieth century, Felice Casorati – with the exhibition “Beyond the mirror”, curated by Olga Gambari.
“In the large corpus of works created by Francesco Casorati, I have traced and followed a common thread of surrealist influence, which is particularly evident in his final period. As if, with advanced maturity, he had achieved a freedom and visionaryness that made his painting take flight, dematerializing its boundaries and definitions. As in a mirror that is passed through”, this is how the curator and art critic, Olga Gambari, describes the exhibition.
The curator’s choice was to concentrate on some particularly symbolic nuclei of works: “Representative of an intuitive nature that is also surrealist, certainly not referable to an adhesion to the historical movement, but to the sharing of a kindred spirit that evoked dimensions outside the time, linked to dreamlike and psychoanalytic depths, to decontextualized and re-semantized, and often disturbing, objects, to the subversion of binomials such as above/below, sky/sea, reality/simulacrum. On the other hand, he loved René Magritte as much as Alberto Savinio. Casorati was spontaneously a refined, cultured surrealist artist, with a cerebral and controlled, programmatic nature, with a rarefaction that kept the free rein of the imagination in check in representations of silence, metaphysical, played on two-dimensionality, with a meditative pulsation”.

Archivio Casorati DE RERUM NATURA – Antonietta Raphael, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith

Dario — Sat, 05 Nov 2022 18:51:54 +0000

The volume illustrates the exhibition at the Studio Museo Felice Casorati in Pavarolo (Turin), an itinerary that tells the story of three female artists, belonging to different eras, who themselves have different stories but who tell everything in the most authentic way what unites man to his deep and congenital bond with the earth, roots, nature.
The exhibition begins with a masterly work by the artist Antonietta Raphael (Kaunas, 29 July 1895 – Rome, 5 September 1975) entitled “Autoritratto scrivendo una lettera a Mario” from 1942. Through the self-portraits, which mark her entire production, Antonietta she represents herself as a woman, mother and artist, placing the theme of identity at the center of her work precisely through the story of herself.
Some of the most fascinating and undoubtedly most important works by the artist Kiki Smith (Nuremberg, 1954) are also presented. Nature and culture, intellect and body, beauty and transience are the conditions of the human being that Kiki Smith examines in her work. It reveals the fragility of the body while exploring the individual’s relationships with animals and the environment. Finally, there is one of the most famous works by the artist Cindy Sherman (Glen Ridge, 1954). The work, titled Untitled #38, from 1979 is part of the famous “Untitled Film Stills” series. It is a suite of 70 black and white photographs taken over the course of three years in which the artist posed as various female film characters, including the ingenue, the worker, the vampire and the lonely housewife. The exhibition is realized thanks to the collaboration with the Giuseppe Iannaccone Collection, Milan, the Municipality of Pavarolo with the coordination of Francesca Solero and curated by Archivio Casorati.

Archivio Casorati FRANCESCO CASORATI – TRA MAGIA E GEOMETRIA

Dario — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 18:53:05 +0000

The volume traces through thirty works the most significant stages of the artist’s long career, dividing it into four main “focuses” dedicated by choice only to his pictorial works and selected for their emblematic meaning by the curator Elena Pontiggia, who, in her introductory essay to the catalogue, underlines the completely original and independent nature of Francesco Casorati’s artistic career. In fact, it transpires how Francesco Casorati’s painting has the ability to dialogue with contemporary trends without belonging to any of them and even when, at the beginning of the sixties, lines and volumes tend to dissolve in his paintings, they keep their roots and genesis intact figurative and narrative.

Archivio Casorati FRANCESCO CASORATI – LA GRANDE NAVE

Dario — Thu, 28 Jul 2022 18:28:27 +0000

“I can’t tell if I paint the sea because I love it or if I go to sea because I like to paint it. I think my love for the sea dwells as much in the heart of the navigator as in the curious eye of the artist, always looking for new emotions The sea is, for a painter, an inexhaustible source of extraordinary emotions, graphic and pictorial: here there is everything a painter could wish for: infinite variety of colours, shades and tones, constantly changing shapes, signs that they are created, unraveled, merged, in an incessant change. I reserve an important space in my compositions for the inhabitants of the sea – fish, birds, boats. I am fascinated by the contrast between the lightness of these elements and the strength of the sea. working on the fragility of matter fascinates, perhaps because it also reflects my desire to reflect on my own fragility.The sea, like the waves, the ships, the smoke from the chimneys are never copies from life, but graphic elaborations and pictorial that take their cue from reality.” (Francesco Casorati)

Archivio Casorati FRANCESCO CASORATI – OPERA INCISA

Dario — Fri, 06 Jul 2018 15:48:15 +0000

The volume is dedicated to the graphic work of Francesco Casorati and is the catalog of the homonymous retrospective exhibition, set up at the Central Institute for Graphics in Rome which presented to the public a selection of about sixty sheets made with intaglio engraving techniques from 1952 to 1995.
For Francesco Casorati, graphics represented a parallel and never subordinate sphere to painting. On the contrary, one of the most acute interpreters of his work, Luigi Carluccio, noted that the “experiences of the engraver at times surpassed or preceded his work as a painter”. In full freedom and in dialogue with an international context, Casorati explored all the potential of engraved graphics, dedicating himself to multiple experiments on materials, etching methods, signs and colors. Examples, in this sense, are the variants, in print, of “Battaglia” (1954) or the two versions of “Battaglia dei tre cavalieri” (1957). With the same freedom the artist went through the informal period, represented in the exhibition with sheets exhibited in the personal room at the 1962 Venice Biennale, and then the phase close to the committed figuration (“The smoked house”, “The tree and the train” , both from 1967), in which the playful and narrative character that always accompanied the work of Francesco Casorati remains. In the seventies, the theme, rooted in the specularity inherent in printed graphics, of twinning and refraction of the image appeared, taking shape in fabulous bestiaries and dizzying graphic labyrinths. It will be the absolute purity of the sign, the etching “writing”, to dominate the last phase, in which the synthesis does not exclude refined and allusive, at times disturbing, expressive solutions.