MIDeC is pleased to present Informale a Laveno, curated by Enrico Brugnoni, an exhibition of rare ceramics that well represent the ceramic arts movement in Laveno in the informal period, led by the personalities of Guido Andlovitz and Antonia Campi.
At the end of the twenty years of Fascism, the world of the arts showed an intolerance towards the models of Deco art, moreover, in Laveno, source for over twenty years of an important critical and commercial success. From the end of the 1940s, the artists Guido Andlovitz, artistic director at Ceramica di Laveno, and Antonia Campi proposed and created works outside of any known scheme at the time. Thus a new free artistic movement was born in Laveno, “free”, dedicated to the search for the informal: a real turbulence, a new horizon in ceramic art.
Informal art in part derived from Expressionism, art at the antipodes with the tradition of the past, with images that went beyond common visual knowledge, art thoughts for new “shapeless forms”, as they were described at the time.
The stylistic current developed over twenty years, from the 1940s to the evolutionary conclusion that coincided with the death of Lucio Fontana and Leoncillo Leonardi in 1986; the latter, following the Cubist experience, was the promoter of the Informal art in Italy in 1956. Lucio Fontana, on the other hand, had already started as early as 1936. We also remember the artist Fausto Melotti with his famous free compositions.
Artists of the calibre of Jean Hans Arp and Pablo Picasso were the creators of Informal thought worldwide. Pablo Picasso represents a reference of this artistic period with his spontaneous works, of immediacy in form, without traces already written or molds or lathe, but an inventiveness without preconceived geometric certainties, free in thought and stroke.
Andlovitz in Laveno dedicated his artistic inventiveness not only to the “Società Ceramica Italiana di Laveno” with the production of earthenware, but also to his subsidiaries “Ceramica Revelli” and “Porcellana Verbano”, executing forms of absolute artistic importance produced not in large quantities and now particularly rare.
Antonia Campi, later, from 1947, was an artist with a fervid imagination, decisive for the renewed success in Laveno of the new trend while she was at the peak of her artistic maturity. The new production line wanted by Andlovitz in the factory and directed by “Neto”, called “Fantasia” line, was specially created for the strong descriptive qualities, the innovative style proposed by “Neto” (as it was amicably called by his friends Antonia Campi).
The works produced in Laveno had a significant success, well described by art critics in the major magazines of the time; now they are present in major international museums and particularly sought after by collectors. Giò Ponti wrote in this way for the Laveno works proposed in the various triennials: “A superior taste and aesthetics through the collaboration of artists chosen with criterion and with the cult of perfect execution“.
Informale a Laveno proposes itself as a cultural initiative suitable, for the first time, thanks to the collaboration between the public and the private sector, to bring to the knowledge of enthusiasts (and not only) a reality still unknown to most people.
from 3 November 2019 to 6 January 2020
Opening: Sunday, November 3, 2019, 11:30 a.m.
Winter Hours, from October 1st:
Friday, Saturday and Sunday 10-13 / 14-17
