The life and works of Alcide Ticò (Trento, 1911 – Ortisei, 1991) have countless connections to the great history of 20th-century art. In his personal life and artistic career, he crossed paths with such people as Adolfo Wildt, Gino Pancheri, Carlo Belli, Arturo Martini, Giacomo Manzù, and Edoardo Persico.

During the Second World War, he was an aviator, and immediately following the war, one of the leading figures in the artistic heyday of Via Margutta in Rome. His studio was a meeting place for artists, collectors, merchants and critics, and was chosen for the filming of that masterpiece of cinema that best describes the social and cultural ferment in the capital in those years: Roman Holiday.

A guest at various editions of the Venice Biennale and the Quadriennale in Rome, he was also a lecturer in sculpture at leading institutions, including the Scuola di Scultura [School of Sculpture] in Ortisei and the Accademia di Belle Arti [Academy of Fine Arts] in Carrara, and a member of the Accademia degli Agiati [Academy of the Learned] in Rovereto.

Much of his work is now part of the Mart Collections thanks to the generous donation by his heirs. It is the actual prominence of Ticò's works preserved in the Museum's Collections that demands a dual approach to interpretation: the exhibition pits the two souls of his sculptural research against each other. On the one hand is the figurative side, which Ticò worked on from his debut up to the early 1960s. It takes the form of a portraiture that combines a distinct formal synthesis with a studied psychological analysis of the sitter. On the other hand are the abstract languages, which gradually took over from the early 1970s to become exclusive in the last years of his life, drawing on inspirations derived from pure geometric forms and astral bodies.