The Andrea Ingenito Contemporary Art Gallery is pleased to announce the group exhibition “LA DOLCE VITA A NAPOLI. Franco Angeli | Tano Festa | Giosetta Fioroni” curated by Andrea Ingenito, that will be held from May 18 to June 30  2023 (opening May 18 H. 18:30).

It is well-known that the city of Naples has been experiencing, for some years now, a period of strong cultural and tourist momentum, which has consequently brought a positive economic impact on the city and a rediscovered enthusiasm (thanks also to the latest successes in football with the victory of the league after 33 years and in cinema with the Oscars won by Paolo Sorrentino and Tony Servillo). May, moreover, has always represented for the city a month of great focus on art with numerous institutional and private initiatives (the most famous of them is ‘Maggio dei Monumenti’). In this stimulating atmosphere somewhat reminiscent of the happy Roman age of the 1960s, the Andrea Ingenito Contemporary Art gallery decided to inaugurate this exhibition with a strongly evocative title: “LA DOLCE VITA A NAPOLI” (borrowing the title from Federico Fellini’s famous film).

The focus of the exhibition this time is on three of the four protagonists of the famous Piazza del Popolo school. After having already presented the work of the most famous exponent, Mario Schifano, several times, both in a solo exhibition and in various group exhibitions, curator Andrea Ingenito has decided this time to focus on Franco Angeli, Tano Festa and Giosetta Fioroni, artists to whom both museums, fairs and discerning collectors are devoting new and special attention.

In the exhibition, there will be an alternation of works by the three great masters, focusing on the 1970s, those of the consecration of each of them and those of their participation in the Biennali di Venezia.

Biographies.

Franco Angeli has been able to combine the tradition of Italian art with the styles and symbols of mass culture in an original way. Among the works on exhibits will be paintings that show the artist’s stylistic evolution from the works of the 1960s and his capacity for innovation. Famous are the series of works depicting planes flying over landscapes and evoking a sense of speed and movement and the ‘Half dollar’ series, in which the artist takes the symbol of the American dollar, with the eagle as the central element, and transforms it into a work of art through formal manipulation and artistic context. This series was exhibited for the first time at the Arco gallery in Rome in January 1966.

Tano Festa, on the other hand, created works that explore the essence of reality through the use of bright, vivid colours and contributed to the Italian pop-art movement, which is distinct from the American pop-art movement because it is closer to our culture and traditions.
In the early 1960s, he abandoned his informal gestures and produced his first monochrome paintings. Protagonists of the exhibition will be the most significant works realised for the cycle Adam and Eve and Original Sin, the first created from 1963 onwards, which is characterised by vivid, saturated colours that create a strong visual impact and by geometric shapes that overlap and intersect. The result is a vibrant and dynamic image, representing the beauty and vitality of human life. The second cycle, the one on Original Sin, differs from the first in its use of darker colours and more organic, twisted forms set in a dark, almost disturbing context.

Giosetta Fioroni, is the only female figure to be part of the Piazza del Popolo school. She was the first of the three artists to participate in the Venice Biennale in 1956 (and in 1964), until the 1993 Biennale where she participated with a solo exhibition. She is a multifaceted artist who has experimented with different artistic production techniques during her career, producing silverware, canvases and drawings made with industrial enamels and paints, experiments with aluminium and a vast production of ceramic sculptures. In her artistic career, she has always tried to look at the world through the eyes of a child so as not to lose the wonder caused by small things, as she herself says: “In all my work there is a kind of common matrix that is childhood, a particular childhood, lived amidst elements that are very much linked to visionaryism”.

Several exhibitions have been dedicated to her over the years by the Gallery (solo exhibitions: I teatrini/presepi – MADRE Museum Naples – 2015; Carte anni ’60 – 2015; Capri – 2016; Il Professor di Desiderio – 2019; group exhibitions: Fioroni, Rotella, Schifano – 2016; World on paper. Dialoghi su carta – 2017; Dieciperdieci – 2020; Dieciperdieci II edition – 2021; Masters – 2022).

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