Adelchi-Riccardo Mantovani
The Dream of Ferrara
Exhibition - from sunday 30 oct 2022 | to sunday 05 feb 2023
Adelchi-Riccardo Mantovani, "La cantastorie 2", 1986-87, Collezione Gerhard Schulze e Terue Mizonobe-Schulze
Adelchi-Riccardo Mantovani, "L'apoteosi di Pinocchia", 1992, Collezione privata
Adelchi-Riccardo Mantovani, "La vendetta della strega", 2013, Collezione privata
Adelchi-Riccardo Mantovani, "Il paletot rosso", 2002, Collezione Walter Matteucci
- When
- from sunday 30 oct 2022 | to sunday 05 feb 2023
- Cost
- General admission €11, discount admission €9 (ticket valid for all current exhibitions)
- Credits
- From an idea by Vittorio Sgarbi. Curated by Beatrice Avanzi. In collaboration with Fondazione Ferrara Arte
- Where
- Mart Rovereto
- Type
- Exhibition
"What I know today I have learnt myself. I am, so to speak, a wild painter, because I grew up as a savage, without help or support. […] This was my art education: observing and drawing"
Adelchi R. Mantovani
The Mart hosts the second stage of the first major exhibition dedicated to Adelchi-Riccardo Mantovani. Extraordinary painter and illustrator he is known mainly in Germany, his adopted homeland, where he attended evening painting schools, nude painting courses, studied art history and participated in group exhibitions together with other artists.
In this period, he fully realised his unique pursuit of the creation of an allegorical and fairy-tale world rooted in ancient art (15th-century painting from the Po Valley and Flemish naturalism), while at the same time he incorporated the inspirations of the most fascinating figurative currents of the early 20th century--from de Chirico's Metaphysics to the German New Objectivity, from Delvaux and Magritte's Surrealism to Magic Realism.
It is as if Mantovani's entire oeuvre is poised between two extremes and synthesises them: while on the one hand there is the almost maniacal observation of reality and its faithful representation, on the other there is the dream and the typically Ferrarese evocation of the fantastic.
The exhibition retraces through over one hundred works the key moments of Mantovani's creative journey; by rediscovering the traditional values of painting and drawing, he destabilises the perception of reality and becomes a visionary, projecting it into dreamlike and suspended atmospheres: from the paintings of his youth to the autobiographical and fairytale-like works of the 1980s and 1990s; from allegorical and popular images to the typical landscapes of the Po Valley, up to the latest works pertaining to the present time. A journey full of subtle, intimate impressions that tells the human and creative story of a man who “since childhood has always felt the urge to translate thoughts and fantasy into images”.
The exhibition is organised by Mart together with Ferrara Arte and the Art Museums Service of the City of Ferrara and it first opened there, at the Castello Estense (5 March-9 October).