Nanni Valentini: il canto della terra

The Ambrosetti Arte Contemporanea Foundation, in co-operation with the Nanni Valentini Archive, presents the restrospective Nanni Valentini: il canto della terra/Nanni Valentini: the song of the Earth curated by Paolo Campiglio.
On display there are about 50 works: drawings, sculptures and never seen before ceramic installations which illustrate his artistic career from the beginning of the 1950s to the last works of the 1980s.
The thorough anthological exhibition presents the intense activity as a sculptor of Nanni Valentini (Sant’Angelo in Vado, 1932 – Vimercate, 1985), an artist of great intellectual and artistic talent.
The display is organized according to the typical phases of the master’s research and is divided into four main periods of time: the beginnings, from 1955 to 1958, when the artist started working in Milan and got into contact with the research of Lucio Fontana (with whom he co-operates, among other things, for a monumental work in ceramic at Faenza between 1959 and 1960); the drawings and sculptures of the 1960s, linked to the research of the end of the decade which were the prelude to the turning point of the 1970s; the drawings and sculptures of the 1970s, which took him to interpret the space as landscape in a symbiotic research with the archetypes of the Earth and of the world; finally the work from the 1980s, where the research on the archetypes and the anthropological models of Western civilization is emphasized in a singular sculptural hypothesis in-between immanence and transcendence of matter.