New at the shop

Fondazione Luigi Rovati, as part of its commitment to promoting and rediscovering artists who are little known to the general public, now presents Adelia Maggi and Remo Bianco.

 

ADELIA MAGGI began her artistic journey later in life and developed an extraordinary exploration of colors and forms through ceramics. The Foundation has acquired the artist’s entire body of work and now presents it exclusively to the public.

 

REMO BIANCO, a Milanese artist, is represented with two works inside the spaces of the Foundation. As part of the collaboration with the Fondazione Remo Bianco, the museum shop features limited and numbered ceramic boxed sets produced by Rosenthal and inspired by the most iconic masterpieces of the artist, the Tableaux Dorés.

 

 

 

ADELIA MAGGI’S CERAMICS

 

MATTER AND FREEDOM

In Brianza, one of the most industrious and prosperous regions in the world, being corresponds to doing. Small companies, large industries, farms, scientific laboratories. The bond between people and objects is shaped by work. The anthropological model is that of the artisanal workshop, and beyond what one creates, the ultimate purpose is to be both useful and creative.

Adelia is from Brianza, from Limbiate, and her ceramics embody this intertwining of labor and creativity. Like many there, she was the daughter of industrial entrepreneurs who lived for and within the company. She wanted something different: as a child she painted, copied and soon began to invent imaginary forms. What intrigued her most was color. How to use it and how to invent it.

She dreamed of studying at the Brera Academy. Yet her family, protective and loving, did not trust those strange and dangerous worlds for their youngest daughter. They encouraged her toward a traditional education in a boarding school: classical high school and then philosophy. Her talent lay dormant, waiting for the right opportunity.

Later in life, already a mother, she began to paint again, picking up where she had left off at fourteen. First she copied the great masters (Bruegel first and Van Gogh later, her favorites) and then she focused on her own world: color and deconstructed forms.

Soon came exhibitions and “surprised” attention for this new painter, a lady. Some critics, like Claudia Gianferrari, said she represented a new dripping, a new Pollock. She never replied. She smiled: “I do not know… it just comes to me… I try.” This defined her rare attitude to life. Humility in her search for substantial aesthetics, corresponding to her own feminine sense of aesthetics. She rejected everything rooted in narcissism and idle talk about art.

Ceramics became her arrival point, her true dimension. “I use my hands, I feel the earth… because, deep down, I am a farmer.” Not a witty remark. She truly meant it. She enrolled in a vocational school (a popular one in Milan, in Corso Vercelli) and soon began working independently in a small studio. She resumed her research on color, especially black, browns, red, and on inventing new chromatic codes. Her exploration of morphological structures followed, shifting from small to large forms, always driven by color. Vases, cups, containers, plates became undefined functions and objects. In parallel with color, she sought new figures through deconstruction, accidental shapes emerging from the negation of “form”.

Her work ultimately defined a style of experimentation. The study of the round evolved into waves, fluidity, and the indefinite. The unexpected becomes the result. Adelia’s ceramics are jazz. There is a beginning, a language, then the improvisation.

“When I start, I do not know how it will end or what I will finally create. I want to be free.”

Freedom. Adelia’s pursuit. Ceramics gave back at least a part of that freedom to her.

(Mario and Matteo Abis)

 

 

 

REMO BIANCO – TABLEAUX DORÉS

Porcelain box by Rosenthal, after Tableaux Dorés

Limited and numbered edition

 

THE ARTIST

Born in Milan in 1922 and passing in 1988, Remo Bianco was an Italian artist known for his continuous experimentation and aesthetic and conceptual innovation. A student of Filippo de Pisis, he began his career in the 1930s while attending the Brera Academy. Influenced by Lucio Fontana’s Spatialism and the Nuclear Movement, Bianco distinguished himself through the use of unconventional materials such as glass, plastic, and metals. Among his most celebrated works are the Tableaux Dorés, enhanced with gold leaf; the Impronte, casts of everyday objects; the Sculture Neve, symbols of a suspended time; and the 3D Works, created with layered materials that produce effects of depth and transparency.

 

THE TABLEAUX DORÉS

Remo Bianco created the first works of the Tableaux Dorés series in 1957. These artworks were produced by covering the surface of a collage with a single color, applying gold leaves, and painting the canvas with two colors in a way reminiscent of heraldry. The Tableaux Dorés, one of the artist’s most significant and enduring cycles, stand out for the light emanating from the golden tesserae, whose irregular surfaces counterbalance the preciousness and fragility of the gold leaf.