“My art is an act of decolonisation.”

Wifredo Lam was born in 1902 in Sagua La Grande, Cuba. Son of a Chinese father and a mother of Afro-Spanish descent, Wilfredo (who would change the spelling of his name to Wifredo in 1924) developed a strong inclination towards drawing from an early age. This led him first to study the great European masters—Leonardo da Vinci, Goya, Velázquez and Delacroix—and subsequently to enroll in the Escuela Profesional de Pintura y Escultura, Academia de San Alejandroin Havana.
In 1923, after holding his first solo exhibition in Havana, he won a scholarship that enabled him to travel to Europe. At twenty-one he moved to Madrid, where he attended the Escuela Libre de Paisaje and came into contact with the ideas and movements of modern art. These encounters prompted him to reflect on the connections between Western art and what was then labelled “primitive” art—a constellation of images, gestures and forms familiar to him since childhood. During this period, he was in search of his own style, mainly dedicating himself to portraits and landscapes, integrating into Madrid’s cultural milieu and exhibiting in local galleries.
In 1938 he decided to leave for Paris, where he met Picasso. Despite coming from different artistic backgrounds, the two had achieved similar formal outcomes, which fostered a profound affinity between them and secured Lam’s acceptance into the Parisian circles of painters, critics and poets. Here he also met André Breton and the Surrealist movement. A few years after his arrival in France, his first solo show was held at Galerie Pierre, followed by a group exhibition with Picasso at the Perls Gallery in New York.
With the outbreak of the Second World War, Lam was forced to return to Cuba after eighteen years away. This marked the beginning of an extraordinarily fertile phase in his work, characterised by an in-depth exploration of Afro-Cuban culture and its rituals, informed by family stories and his own childhood memories. Rediscovering his roots led him to reinvent his pictorial practice, forging an imagery that subtracted itself “from the dream of exoticism that plagued Western painting” by merging elements of European avant-gardes (Cubism and Surrealism) with Afro-Cuban art.

From 1942 onwards he exhibited regularly at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, and throughout the 1940s and 50s his works were featured in major group shows at the Institute of Modern Art in Boston, the MoMA in New York, and the Liljevalchs Konsthall in Stockholm. These were followed by his participation in the Salon de Mai (from 1954 to 1982), Documenta II in Kassel (1959) and the Venice Biennale (1972).
From the 1950s Lam was invited to the Incontri Internazionali di Scultura e Ceramica in Albisola Marina, where he came into contact with artists of the Movimento Nucleare and with international collectors, among them Giovanni and Anna Pia Mazzoleni. These encounters led him to begin working with ceramics, simplifying his style to adapt it to the technical demands of the medium.
In the 1960s he held numerous solo exhibitions across the Americas, Italy and France, and in 1964 he was awarded the Guggenheim International Award.
In the 1970s his work was characterised by a return to vibrant colours and by his experimentation with terracotta, showcased for the first time in 1975 at the Museo della Ceramica in Albisola. Several monographs, were published in different languages during these years, celebrating both his international reputation and a career which came to a close with his death in Paris in 1982.
Recognised today as both a pioneering figure of modernism and as a forerunner of contemporary decolonial thought, his works are held in collections worldwide. These include the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, and the Wifredo Lam Contemporary Art Center in Havana. In Italy, his works are part of the permanent collections of several major institutions, including the Museo della Ceramica in Savona, the MuDA in Albisola Marina and the Museo del Novecento in Milan.

Source: Luciano Caprile (ed.), Wifredo Lam. Cuba Italia. Un percorso, Silvana Ed., Cinisello Balsamo, 2002
Website: wifredolam.org

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My process of making sculptures involves a return to the design project, that is, a re-idealization of certain objects, which are mostly anonymous… My sculpture is not indexical. Instead of reproducing an actual object, it alludes to its technical drawing, to the conception of its shape and dimensions.

Iran do Espírito Santo was born in Mococa, Brazil in 1963. Often working on an ambitious scale, he wryly subverts the Minimalist tradition through his abstracted sculptures of familiar everyday objects made strange by their disorientating size and incongruous materials, such as granite, glass, steel, copper or stone. These sculptural works strip away all extraneous detail, emphasizing the essential line and form of the object. This rigorous simplicity carries through to his demanding wall drawings in paint and sgraffito that transform the entire gallery through subtle gradations of tone and hypnotic repetition of pattern but require many weeks to complete. It was a combination of these two aspects of his practice which comprised the artist’s first UK solo exhibition, at Ingleby Gallery during Edinburgh Art Festival 2010.

In the past two decades, Iran do Espírito Santo has received much international acclaim and his works have been exhibited widely in museums and galleries worldwide, and are included in the collections of many prominent museums such as: the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, MAXXI, Rome, IMMA, Dublin and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. He has also made substantial contributions to the Venice Biennale (1999 and 2007), the Bienal de São Paulo (1987), and the Istanbul Biennal (2000). Recent exhibitions have included Reflexivos at Oi Futuro, Brazil (2019) and Chosen Memories – Contemporary Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift and Beyond, MoMA, USA (2023).

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Clarifying a mystery is indelicate to the mystery itself.

Alberto de Chirico, known as Savinio, was born in Athens in 1891 to Italian parents, the younger brother of surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico. Following his father’s death, after a short stay in Italy, he moved to Munich with his mother and brother in 1906. In Germany, he began his creative career, through the study of counterpoint with the composer Max Reger and the composition of an opera entitled Carmela.
At the end of February 1907, he and his brother left Munich to move to Italy, living first in Rome and Milan, and then Florence. Here the brothers studied ancient languages, literature, music, and philosophy, practicing painting and drawing, whilst working together to lay the foundations of the new Metaphysical language.
However, in 1911 Savinio moved to Paris, where he completely separated his practice from his brother’s, until in January 1914 his brother introduced him to Guillaume Apollinaire. Apollinaire and Savinio became close friends and collaborators, with Savinio briefly participating in the avant-garde artistic circles that surrounded the poet. In that same year, he decided to adopt the pseudonym Alberto Savinio, to distinguish himself from his brother.
When Italy entered the Great War in May 1915, the brothers returned to Florence where they were sent to Ferrara as part of the infantry reserves. Here they began to correspond extensively with Ardengo Soffici and Giovanni Papini, who helped introduce them to Italy’s literary and artistic circles. Carlo Carrà arrived in Ferrara in the spring of 1917, giving rise to the short-lived alliance that would arbitrarily be dubbed the ‘Metaphysical School’. In Ferrara, Savinio abandoned music and devoted himself entirely to literature, although he never stopped drawing.
In the early 1920s, Savinio collaborated with all of the leading literary reviews in Italy, whilst also returning to his passion for music and theatre, but in 1926 he joined his brother in Paris and began to paint seriously, receiving both public and critical acclaim. His first solo show, held at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in 1927, was presented by Jean Cocteau. Savinio continued to cultivate the contacts he had made with André Breton and the Surrealists, while on a commercial level, he worked with the galleries that gravitated around Paul Guillaume and Léonce Rosenberg.
The key themes of Savinio’s painting focus on the world of memory and childhood, which are also present within his writing. One of the cornerstones of his work is nostalgia for his father Evaristo, presented within his work as a childhood ‘descent into the past’ through images of toys, placed like islands in the sea or dark forests, that allude directly to his grief-stricken childhood. The toys depicted in the paintings rise like mausoleums and trophies to celebrate the lost season that the artist revisits and rediscovers through painting. In the following years, Savinio built a large iconographic apparatus of hybrid and metamorphic figures, suspended between ancient statuary and the depiction of living bodies, between artifice and humanity, monstrosity and beauty. These colourful shapes and silhouettes create oneiric landscapes and ‘islands’ where the artist’s memories merge with myth.
This success was unfortunately short-lived however and came to an end with the financial crash of 1929. In 1933 he returned to Italy, initially settling in Turin before moving to Rome. From the mid-1930s and throughout much of 1940s, he devoted his time to literary activities and journalism. During this period, he virtually abandoned painting, practicing it only occasionally, devoting his time to graphics, often illustrating his own publications. Following World War II, he took up music again, composing the ballet Vita dell’uomo and at the same time, directing plays and designing sets, collaborating successfully with the Teatro alla Scala in Milan and the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, for which he executed his last work in 1952 with the staging of Gioacchino Rossini’s Armida.
In 1952, Alberto Savinio’s intellectual and creative career was interrupted by his sudden death, leaving behind an artistic legacy in which music, literature, painting, journalism, dramaturgy and set design combine.

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I believe in the gift of instinct that finds expression in the magical sense of the work.

Carla Accardi was born in Trapani on 9th October 1924.
Accardi studied art in high school, and later went on to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo, where she met Antonio Sanfilippo. In 1946 she moved to Rome, where the following year she became the only woman to sign the Forma 1 manifesto. These artists aimed to reconcile Marxist and formalist political views through abstract and realist art, with each of the participants developing a personal language over time. Accardi’s language is characterised by a feminist vein which, through the creation of new enigmatic signs, aims to disrupt the association between delicacy and the feminine in art, as well as to criticize the patriarchal tradition of the Western world.
Forma 1’s first exhibition occurred in Rome in 1947, and Accardi’s first solo show soon followed, in 1950 at the Galleria Age d’or, Rome, with her early paintings consisting of interlocking black and white geometric forms.

At the base of Accardi’s research there is continuous experimentation: in the 1960s she reintegrated colour and began painting on sicofoil, a transparent plastic, instead of canvas, which lead her to her first experiments of installation art. Examples of such, are the well-known Tenda (1965-66) and Ambiente Arancio (1966-68).
In 1964 she participated for the first time in the Venice Biennale, later returning for several following editions. In the 1980s, Accardi returned to the canvas, using it as support for large and colourful signs and in 1994 she took part in the historical review on Italian art “The Italian Metamorphosis 1943-1968” at the Guggenheim in New York.
In 1996 she became a member of the Brera Academy and the following year she was proclaimed advisor to the Commission for the Venice Biennale. In the early 2000s, Accardi was dedicated solo exhibitions by important Italian and foreign institutions, including the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2002 and the MACRO in Rome in 2004. Numerous museums have Accardi’s works in their collections, such as: Guggenheim in New York and Venice, Centre Pompidou in Paris, MAMbo in Bologna and GAM in Turin.
Carla Accardi passed away in Rome on 23 February 2014.

Photo: “Gruppo Forma 1”: Pietro Consagra, Mino Guerrini, Ugo Attardi, Carla Accardi, Achille Perilli, Antonio Sanfilippo e Piero Dorazio (Roma, 1947)
Sources:
Fonti: Germano Celant, Carla Accardi, Silvana Editoriale, Zerynthia 2011

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Toscani was one of the founding professors of the Mendrisio Academy of Architecture, he taught visual communication in various universities and wrote books on communication.
After nearly six decades of publishing innovation, advertising, film and television, he is now interested in the creativity of communication applied to various media, producing editorial projects, books, television programs, exhibitions and workshops.
He has won numerous awards such as the Golden Lion four times at the Cannes Film Festival, the Grand Prix d’Affichage twice, the UNESCO Grand Prix, the Saatchi & Saatchi Creative Hero Award and several Art Directors Club awards from around the world. The Academy of Fine Arts of Urbino awarded him the Il Sogno di Piero prize. He received the title of Academic of Honour from the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and that of Academic of Merit from the Academy of Perugia. In 2021 he received the Lorenzo il Magnifico Career Award at the XIII Florence Biennale. In 2017 he obtained honorary degrees from the Academy of Fine Arts of Brescia and from the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo, and in 2018 from the University of the Arts in Zurich. Oliviero Toscani is an honorary member of the Leonardo Committee and of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.

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