The Studio Gariboldi gallery is pleased to present a solo show dedicated to the Japanese artist Katsumi Nakai (1927-2013), displaying a selection of works created in the 1960s and 1970s during his Milanese period.
Nakai studied painting at the Institut of Fine Arts of Osaka and after completing his studies he participated to several collective exhibitions. In 1956 he had his first solo show at the gallery Omote and in 1958 he founded, with other seven avant-garde artists, the Tekkeikai group.
In the spring of 1964, when he was 37 years old, as many Japanese artists of the time, he decided to visit Europe and the United States. His path took him to Milan, a city that impressed him profoundly to become the last stage of his trip “following the sun”.

The transition into the fifties was a fundamental step for some artists of the first generation of the School of New York. The Abstract Expressionists were able to pursue a personal research and to become more and more focused on their independent styles, deeply influencing the evolution of artistic tendencies nationally and globally.
The artists of the second generation also developed distinct and unique languages. Raymond Parker (1922-1990) works in the context of this artistic research. He will be recognised as an Abstract Expressionist, but he is also linked to Color Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction and considered a crucial figure of the Post-Painterly Abstraction movement.

Studio Gariboldi is pleased to present the Greeks, a group exhibition of artists whose works have contributed to the shaping of the contemporary Greek art until the present day. The main idea is to showcase a selection of artists from different artistic backgrounds but who were born into the same cultural traditions and individually evolved along their inner paths.

Every pair is formed through a dialogue. Each of it maintains this contact until it founds new and different ways of comprehension. There are couples that become an absolute value, some of them are mutually complementary and others make one plus one be equal three.

When a work of art enters in our visual space, at that very moment it starts to communicate with us.

Studio Gariboldi would like to present its own vision through the exhibition Dialoghi. Still life or paso doble, the pairs are aesthetic harmonies ready to create a multilateral relationship with the collector. It will be the fantasy and the culture of each spectator to call forth emotions and to discover new meanings.

Studio Gariboldi is pleased to present a retrospective exhibition dedicated to Mirko Basaldella (1910-1969), displaying an important selection of bronze sculptures created in the 1950s and 1960s.

From an early age Mirko learned how to whittle wood together with his brothers Dino and Afro at his uncle’s shop in Udine. He studied in Venice, Florence and then in Monza, where he met Arturo Martini, an Italian master who would guide him for several years. In 1933 he moved to Rome and set up a studio with his good friend Corrado Cagli, whose sister Serena he later married. Mirko’s revelation to the art world occurred during the Roman Quadrennial of 1935 (in 1966 he would win the first prize) where he displayed a selection of sculptures. It would be, however, his first solo show at the Galleria della Cometa that gave full measure to a new and important presence in the world of Italian sculpture.

Studio Gariboldi is pleased to present the exhibition 1+1=3 dedicated to the German artist Mary Bauermeister, displaying an important selection of works created in the 1960s and 1970s.

Born in 1934 in Frankfurt on Main, Germany, Bauermeister burst onto the artistic scene in the beginning of the 1960s with a series of shows in Europe and in the United States.

Her studio, Atelier Mary Bauermeister on Lintgasse 28 in Cologne, hosted numerous presentations, happenings, lectures and experimental music concerts. It was the meeting point for prominent artists, musicians, writers and poets, including Nam June Paik, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Otto Piene and Ben Patterson.

Studio Gariboldi is pleased to present a retrospective exhibition, dedicated to Mario Deluigi (1901-1978), one of the Masters of the Italian Spatialism. The showcase focuses on the selected works, created between the beginning of the 1950s and the end of the 1960s. These paintings are the result of a rigorous research of the main theme of his work: the concept of space in relation to color and light.

In 1951 Mario Deluigi signs the Manifesto dell’arte spaziale (Manifesto of the Spatial Art) and in 1952 the Manifesto del movimento spaziale per la televisione (Manifesto of the Spatial movement for the television). The peculiarity of his art-making process is highlighted by the new art technique: the grattage. This technique is already well defined in the series of paintings, titled Motivi sui vuoti, which he exhibited in 1954 at the Venice Biennale. The artist intrudes into the pictorial surface of the canvas by marking and carving it with means like sharp blades, cutters, scalpels and the backsides of the paintbrushes and spatulas. By scratching away previously applied paint layers, Deluigi is able to reveal the bright soul of color. The gesture generates a sign, which in turn, builds the spatial light and plastic forms.

The lightness of the brush on the paper, the predilection to constant exercise, the harmony of shapes are the distinctive characteristics of elegance and beauty. Only someone who was born and raised following the Eastern traditions has been able to transform these features into art. The Japanese among them all.

From 1870 onwards, with the advent of the industrial revolution, Japan started to open up slowly to the Western culture. Between the two world wars and in the postwar period, the young Japanese artists began to learn about different art movements both in Europe and in America. Inspired by German expressionism, abstract and informal art they joined some of the important avant-garde movements. Distorting and transgressing the conventional ideas of their tradition, they were able to build a new personal and collective identities. The elegance overlapped the intensity, and vice versa, the force of the color found a surprising placement in spite of the composure of the pictorial composition.

The painting can be an initiatory journey that give the possibility to grow from within. A work of art become a meditation object in which you can lose and find yourself whenever you want. The work of the artist Helmut Zimmermann (1924-2015) is the perfect example of this vision. Studio Gariboldi is pleased to present a retrospective exhibition dedicated to his paintings of the 60’s.

Helmut Zimmermann was born in 1924 in Bohemia. From 1942 to 1945 he was enlisted in the German anti-aircraft defence. He fought in France, Russia and Italy, where he deserted and switched on the side of the partisans who were fighting in the Piave area. After the war Zimmemann was expelled from Bohemia. He began to study painting and sculpture in Monaco and Nuremberg and to head out on long journeys across Europe. In these years the artist developed a passion for the Carl Gustav Jung’s theories, in particular for the depth psychology and individuation process: concepts that will be the basis of his work for many years.

Studio Gariboldi presents a retrospective exhibition dedicated to Tano Festa (1938-1988), the master of the roman Pop Art and one of the leading artists of the School of Piazza del Popolo. The exhibition focuses on the selected works created between 1960 and 1966, which reflect the main themes of his artistic research: shutters, windows, obelisks, doors, headstones, skies and subjects taken from the masterpieces of Michelangelo.
Tano Festa attended the Art Institute of Rome and got his degree in Artistic Photography in 1957. After numerous group shows with artists like Uncini, Angeli, Schifano and his brother Lo Savio, Festa, being only 23 years old, had his first solo show at the gallery La Salita of Rome, curated by Cesare Vivaldi.

His first artistic production concentrated on the geometric monochrome and the re-elaboration of the objects. His shutters, doors, windows, wardrobes and mirrors weren’t objets trouves, but objects that were carefully reconstructed, veiled with color and therefore deprived of their most obvious sense – they lived in a new poetic art space, which was no longer the space of the daily life. Impassive and silent witnesses of everything that surrounded them, they became visual icons and “contemplation objects”. Paradoxically, Tano Festa was able to make his objects/artworks more real and present than ever.

Studio Gariboldi is pleased to present a retrospective exhibition dedicated to Lombard master Antonio Calderara, displaying his fifteen works, which were created between 1959 and the end of the 1970s – abstract surfaces where the concept of the space is everything and nothing at the same time.
Antonio Calderara (1903-1978), a self-taught painter, has spent most of his life in isolation, residing between Milan and his beloved Lake d’Orta. Over the years he tried to understand and to grasp the ultimate essence of painting. Inspired by the artists, such as Piero della Francesca, Seurat and Vermeer, Calderara has dedicated a few decades to figurative subjects. He depicts places of soul - landscapes, portraits of his wife and daughter and still lives. The primary element of these paintings is the light, which shortly after will become the only conscious protagonist of his works.
However, his approach is bound to take a new drastic turn. In 1958 with a drawing dedicated to my mother, I trace my last curved line, Antonio Calderara writes in his short autobiography. From this moment on the artist goes beyond the horizon of the respresentational art. The latter, in fact, disappears. For Calderara the third dimension becomes an imaginary reality that exists in overlapped layers of color.
Calderara’s need to essentialize the shapes of the objects he represented made his transition from the figurative to abstract art inescapable. The chromatic and compositional purity released the pictorial composition of the object, freeing it step by step from the object itself. Over the years his paintings become pure spaces of light. The constant research of a spiritual order results in harmony, measure and number. Time stops, the light have no sources, the silence is deafening. Rectangles, squares, horizontal and vertical lines, harmoniously synthesized, become the purest expression of reality.

In 1972 the Italian spectators were able to view the exuberant works of the eclectic Japanese artist Key Hiraga (b.1936 – d. 2000) for the first time. After nearly half a century Studio Gariboldi is pleased to present a retrospective exhibition dedicated to the artist, displaying his works from “The elegant life of Mr. K.” series (1960s-1970s).

After graduating from Tokyo University Key Hiraga devoted himself to art. In 1956 he started to participate to some important group exhibitions and that year marked the beginning of his brilliant artistic career. In 1965 a granted scholarship allowed Hiraga to move to Paris - a crucial step for a young artist. After an initial cultural shock, Hiraga has enriched his artistic creativity, which was for a while based on almost total monochromatism, with a burst of color.
Hiraga never missed the opportunity to take inspiration from the place where he lived, the Pigalle district. He observed the Parisian nightlife, which he described in his artworks as very comic and vivid scenes, adding imaginary figures, mysterious men and lustful women.

Sebastiano Vassalli was born in 1941 in Genua, but since he was a child he lived in Novara. He got his Master degree in Literature, defending his thesis on “Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Art” with Cesare Musatti, in the presence of the examiner, Gillo Dorfles. As he said in an interview with Antonio Gnoli (la Repubblica, 2014), he joined the new avant-garde Group 63 as a painter, introduced by the poet Edoardo Sanguineti. Vassalli exhibited his works in two solo shows, first one in Venice (Gallery del Cavallino, 1964) and the second one in Milan (Gallery del Naviglio, 1965); he also participated in a milanese (Premio San Fedele) and roman (Prospettive 1, gallery Due Mondi) group shows in 1965. After seeing the Pop Art at the Venice Biennial in 1964, Vassalli realized that the themes of his work and american collegues were similar: “Today I can definitely say that I did Pop Art without the slightest awareness”, he recognized the communicative power of it and decided to choose another expressive way to continue his research, without ever abandoning his work as an artist, keeping it private and constant passion of his existence.

Studio Gariboldi is pleased to present the exhibition of the artist Luciano Bartolini dedicated to his works of the 70s, the Kleenex. Started in 1973-74, this cycle of works is characterized by the presence of common disposable handkerchiefs, serially disposed and glued on simple support of wrapping or food paper, on which the artist spreads the color - always using it sparingly and with slight color variations.
The surface of these works, rough and wrinkled, seems to evoke – not without causing some sort of disturbing familiarity – an epitherial tissue, some sort of skin that hides beneath blood and lymph vessels. Is there a tactile sense of the eye? The Bartolini’s Kleenex works seem to talk about this possibility. In the first instance the eye is caught by the tactile qualities of these minimal and serial structures which the spectator have the urge to explore. It is the sight that captures all the irregularities, the bumps, the plasticity of these works that anyone, so to speak, can touch with eyes.

Studio Gariboldi is pleased to present the exhibition of the Roman artist Franco Angeli (1935-1988), one of the most important people (with Tano Festa and Mario Schifano) in the “Piazza del Popolo School” later called “Italian Pop Art”. The gallery shows some of the most significant Angeli’s artworks and documents the work of an author who has been able to leave an indelible mark in the Italian art scene after World War II. The gallery presents a selection of works of extraordinary importance: paintings exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1964 and works from eminent collections.

Franco Angeli, whose painting has drawn from a repertoire of ancient and modern symbols (the she-wolf, the eagle, the swastika, the hammer and sickle, the dollar), has been able to develop a language that was able to give voice to a whole generation - that of the sixties - and at the same time to keep his own identity. Angeli’s art was able to blend irony, history, memory and daily universe.

When an artist contributes to trace a new expressive path, he’s a master.
For this reason Salvatore Scarpitta has to be considered as such: he adds innovative stylistic elements to the magma of the existing contamination. These elements have never been experienced before and then are once again to find, with different aesthetic results, in the work of the most important masters of contemporary art.
Scarpitta is American and Italian and one can gather it from the gracefulness with which he uses the force. His works are resolute, powerful, stretched to the point of emotionally absorption of movement, they are effective thanks to the tension and immediacy they express.
On the occasion of the inauguration of the new location of the gallery we have the great pleasure of showing a representative group of works of this great artist.

In a time where the bearings that help to navigate in the immense sea of art proposals go crazy, it seems to be natural and mandatory for a gallery to explain the choice of an artist and of the exhibition dedicated to him.
That is why the choice of the artists and their artworks has to be dictated first of all by coherence, which essentially can be divided in three important points.
The first one regards aesthetic sense.

Studio Gariboldi is pleased to present a selection of unique works for quality and dimensions – metals, filters and some projects.
A trace which makes light and space interpenetrate and revolutionaze the “vision” of volumes and environment.
In fact the spectators perception widens thanks to the metals capacity to interact with the surrounding context and to vary the light and the perspective. Equally, the filters determine a relative chromatic dynamics. The projects underline the methodical progress of the innovative evolution of this avant-garde master.

Space and its boundaries. Time related to the optical perception. Volumes, lines and colors. Projects and plans realized with perseverance and style. In the 1950s many artists concentrated on figurative art, and many of them transformed the latter into its informal form – into a concept, into a synthesis of lines. J.R. Soto made use of time, light and colors.

Clemente, a painter that is first of all a wizard. His prophetic crazed appearence or his Siberian reindeer jackets are not the only reason for this statement. He is in fact skilled and clairvoyant in his art, to a point of a fracture between the lucidity of reality and the indescribable material of dreams. Clemente is able to organize misterious nature of things and mimes the logic of the shadows through his patient artistic effort.