For its upcoming participation at FIAC, Tornabuoni Art presents Rosso! a show of exceptional Italian artworks brought together by one colour: red.

Rosso!, creates a dialogue between an ancestral colour and its use in Modern and Contemporary Italian art. Together with white and black, the colour red became a mighty symbol in the Middle Ages, a sign of power within the different social classes, associated with blood and fire, symbolizing life, vigor, authority and beauty. It benefits from a visual power that other colours do not offer.

With Rosso!, Tornabuoni Art presents a booth organized around an emblematic colour and offers a unique study of the Italian Monochrome and the search of Spatialism. A search started by Fontana, Scheggi, Simeti, Burri and Castellani in the late 50s and pursued today by young artists such as Francesca Pasquali. These artists all examined the power of monochrome through its perception and saturation of the material. The monochrome combined with the color red, offers lighting effects that interplay with the density of the canvas and allows the unseen to be seen, redefining the artworks spatial dimensions. 

When Lucio Fontana painted the Concetto Spaziale, Attese in 1967, he puts into paint what he did into words in his manifesto of Spatialism in 1948. He “opens space, creates a new dimension for art, binds it to the cosmos, that is infinite, expanding beyond the flat surface of the image”. Fontana manages to make the painting “disappear” in favour of a unique colour and perforations that revisit the artwork as a twodimensional sculpture. 

Turi Simeti has placed monochrome at the centre of his artistic research. In Due ovalie alizarin crimson (2011), the artist expresses the results of his active experiments with form and colour surrounding the notion of dynamism. Turi Simeti is today one of the last living figures of this Italian identity. By associating three-dimensional geometrical forms with the color red, he allows his work to acquire a true materiality and surpasses the dimensional codes of the pictorial surface, offering to the viewer dense and moving artworks.

In Dittico Rosso from 1963, Enrico Castellani distances himself from the act of painting, trading it for embossed surfaces using nail structures. These disturbing elements empowered by the monochrome create a dynamic art piece made up of hollows and bumps playing with light and gaze.

Violent but at the same time sensual, for centuries now the colour red has been playing an ambiguous game with its positive and negative associations. With Rosso!, Tornabuoni Art offers a vibrant booth where color becomes the thread running through a modernist story based on movement, the redefinition of boundaries of space and the painting itself.

TORNABUONI ART REPRESENTS THE MAJOR ITALIAN ARTISTS OF THE SECOND HALF OF THE 20TH CENTURY

Tornabuoni Arte was founded in 1981 by Roberto Casamonti and is specialized in Italian art of the second half of the 20th Century. It established exhibition spaces in Milan in 1995, Portofino in 2001, Forte Dei Marmi in 2004 and on October 1st 2009 in Paris, 16 avenue Matignon in the 8th district. 

Tornabuoni Art in Paris presents the work of Fontana, Castellani, Manzoni, Dorazio, Bonalumi, Dadamaino and Boetti together with the major protagonists of the Italian Novecento such as De Chirico, Morandi, Balla, Severeni and Sironi. The gallery also proposes works of essential artists of the 20th Century such as Picasso, Mirò, Kandinsky, Hartung, Poliakoff, Dubuffet, Lam, Matta, Christo, Wesselmann, Warhol and Basquiat.

Since inaugurating its Parisian space in 2009 with an exhibition dedicated to Lucio Fontana, Tornabuoni Art has organized numerous monographic exhibitions, always in close consultation with the artists or the foundations that represent them. The gallery has shown the works of Alighiero Boetti (2010), Arnaldo Pomodoro (2011), Enrico Castellani (2011), Mimmo Rotella (2012), Giuseppe Capogrossi (2013), Dadamaino (2013) and in 2014 presented an exceptional exhibition Lucio Fontana, rediscovery of a masterpiece in parallel with the retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Besides these solo shows, the gallery also presents group shows such as The Monochrome Under Pressure (2012), Bianco Italia (2013) or Between Sign and Writing: a path through Italian art (2014), brought together by different curators who are given carte blanche, each show offering a unique approach to the gallery’s collection. 

The gallery has added a touch of contemporary art to the family tradition and love for Italian art in particular with the artist Francesca Pasquali. The gallery wishes to offer a new visibility to the artists it represents with its soon to be opened exhibition space on 46 Albemarle Street, in the area of Mayfair, London, an important meeting point for the European and American art market.

Many museums have come to the gallery for expertise and guidance and with its experience and thorough knowledge of the work of the artists it represents, the gallery has established itself as advisor for both private and public collections.