Author Description

The decades examined in this exhibition featured a strong adherence to contemporary social themes, in a country that distinguished itself for its fascinating polyphony of creativity, voices and intentions. Paintings and sculptures created and presented to the public in Italy and abroad between 1880 and 1917 will be of particular interest to the contemporary American public. To this day, fin-de-siècle Italian socioeconomic history and artistic developments have received scant attention in the United States, and CIMA's project intends to shed light on these subjects. The exhibition, including approximately 20 artworks from Italian museums and first-rate private collections, focuses on four main iconographic themes, exploring how painters and sculptors elaborated and adjourned them through a confrontation with the contradictions of contemporary society. Migration, labor, protest, and social injustice are the fields of intervention that marked the reality of the artists at the center of CIMA's project--topics whose importance resonates to this very day, both in Italy and in the United States. Artworks by fifteen artists offer a cross-section of the most advanced Italian artistic production of the time. The show includes heterogenous perspectives, styles, and formal languages, which reflect the artists' diverse backgrounds in terms of location, training, and their varied alignment with the pictorial tendencies and tastes of that era. The exhibition will thus also become a dialogue between artists who came from different areas of the country, and who were educated in distinct academic contexts. -- Host institution's website, viewed November 25, 2024.