The Galerie Boulakia is delighted to host an outstanding new exhibition: ‘Magnelli: painting reinvented’, running from October 18th to December 7th 2017. 

 

The exhibition will bring together 25 paintings by Alberto Magnelli – many of which have never been displayed in public before – in the first such showing of the artist’s work in Paris since that held in the Galerie Maeght-Lelong in 1986.

 

The exhibition will focus on paintings dating from the 1920s to 1930, completed in a style which the artist described as ‘painting reinvented’.

 

This period from the 1920s to 1930 represented a key phase in Magnelli’s career. During the course of the previous five years, he discovered the Parisian avant-garde art scene, which was the inspiration behind his first abstract works. He moved to Paris in 1932 to escape from the fascist regime in Italy and made the definitive move to abstraction with ‘Pietre’ (Stones).

 

In France, his paintings were often grouped with the 1920s ‘Return to order’ movement, whilst in Italy they were associated with De Chirico’s and Carrà’s rejection of Modernism. However, the artist emphasized that whilst his works from this period were figurative in style, they were no throwback to the past, but examples of ‘painting reinvented’.

 

Retrospectives of this period of Magnelli’s career were held at the musée de Troyes in 2002, Geneva’s Galerie Sonia Zannettacci in 2004 and the musée Magnelli, Vallauris in 2008.