From 13 March to 16 June, the gallery presents a group exhibition dedicated to the artists who were part of the Gruppo degli Otto (Group of Eight). With a selection of about 15 works, the exhibition brings together the eight Italian artists who, gathered around the art critic Lionello Venturi, participated from 1952 to 1954 in the brief yet intense experience of the Gruppo degli Otto.

With canvases by Afro Basaldella, Renato Birolli, Antonio Corpora, Mattia Moreni, Ennio Morlotti, Giuseppe Santomaso, Giulio Turcato and Emilio Vedova, the show highlights the experimental and profoundly innovative approach of these artists, who, without agreeing on a common language, preferred a subjective and personal abstract painting, free to go beyond the very limits imposed by abstraction.

One of the most significant experiences in Italian art of the last century, the Gruppo degli Otto arose from the split between figurative and abstract artists that occurred in 1950 within the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti (New Front of the Arts) group. Venturi wrote in the movement’s manifesto: ‘they are not and do not want to be abstractionists; they are not and do not want to be realists: they propose to get out of this antinomy that on the one hand threatens to transform abstraction into a renewed mannerism and on the other obeys political orders that disintegrate freedom and creative spontaneity’. The group – composed of a circle of non-figurative artists – intended to initiate a new abstractionist season in Italy, making the Cubist and Expressionist lesson its own and opening up to the air of aesthetic innovation coming from Europe and the United States.

Considered to be among the greatest Italian painters of the post-war period, the exhibition focuses on the personal specificities and expressive declinations that each artist was able to develop autonomously during and after the dissolution of the group. In the exhibition, vibrant and heterogeneous works in terms of subject matter, chromatic temperament and sign gesture bear witness to the marked personality of the individual artists, who are linked in not submitting themselves to a pure abstract language, but in finding a meeting point between the abstract and the concrete, maintaining a relationship with nature and the multiplicity of life.