"From the Earth to the Moon": the exhibition in Turin with works by Chagall, Lucio Fontana and many others

"One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind" (Neil Armstrong). Palazzo Madama has decided to celebrate the exact 50 years of the landing of the first man on the moon with the exhibition of about sixty works that tell the influence of the silver star on art and artists from the nineteenth century until 1969. Exposed paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings and design objects inspired by the Moon.

It is from the nineteenth century that the theme of the lunar journey develops in art, intertwining with themes of exoticism, progress of nations, colonialism even if, in that historical moment, the Moon remains a place reachable only with fantasy. The romantic painters, in particular, interpreting the melancholy and dreamy gaze of man in front of the mystery, deviate the theme of moonlight. In the exhibition this feeling is fully expressed in the paintings of Piedmontese painters such as De Gubernatis, Bagetti and Carutti of Cantogno with the 1911 painting "Sorge la luna".

[Credit Facebook site]

After this first look at nineteenth-century perception, the exhibition continues its journey through the theme of the Moon with some works of the historical avant-gardes: the fairy-tale atmospheres of Marc Chagall, the rigorous metaphysics of Felice Casorati, the meticulous calligraphy of Paul Klee, the surrealism of Max Ernst and Alexander Calder. From the avant-gardes we move on to the second half of the twentieth century where space represents a real obsession in the world of art: looking beyond, touching other surfaces, imagining something further from us. It is not by chance that the most famous works by Lucio Fontana are called "Spatial Concept". Giulio Turcato, on the other hand, defines his monochromes  "the lunar surfaces", produced with anomalous materials, while Robert Rauschenberg realizes the series of multiple "Stoned Moon" in 1968 near the landing on the moon and Mario Schifano reports the vision, in a pop key, through television, with TV landscapes.

[Rauschenberg, Stone Moon, credit Flickr]

On display, in addition to other more important authors such as Yves Klein, the symbolist painter Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, Emilio Isgrò, Arturo Nathan and the Dutch conceptual Van Hoeydonck whose work was literally brought to the Moon and left there by the Apollo 12 mission. Also present some images of NASA and design objects from the 1960s by authors such as Vico Magistretti, Achille Castiglioni, Piero Fornasetti.

[Credit Facebook site]

The works of the exhibition, curated by Luca Beatrice and Marco Bazzini, come not only from Turin museums: GAM, Accorsi-Ometto Foundation, Pinacoteca Albertina and Museo Nazionale del Risorgimento, also from many other important Italian and European museums, institutions and private collections such as for example the Royal Palace of Naples, the Correr Museum of Venice, the Certosa di San Giacomo of Capri, the Museu Coleção Berardo of Lisbon, the Mart of Trento and Rovereto, the Intesa San Paolo Collection, the Marconi Foundation and the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation of Milan and also the Barilla Foundation of Parma and the Gastone Novelli Archive of Rome. Moreover, during the whole period of the exhibition Palazzo Madama will offer a series of conferences at the Circolo dei Lettori and a series of film screenings organized together with the Museo del Cinema.

You can buy tickets for the exhibition "From the Earth to the Moon" at Palazzo Madama in Turin here.

Till 11th November 2019

Hours: 10:00am - 6:00pm Closed on Tuesday 

Full price € 8.00 - Reduced € 6.00 - free admission Museums and Turin season ticket + Piemonte Card