Artists

Alberto Savinio

Press release

The avant-garde painter Alberto Savinio (b.1891, Athens – d. 1952, Rome) will be the subject of a major retrospective highlighting his groundbreaking contribution to 20th art and his enduring relevance to contemporary debates on painting. Alberto Savinio was a Greek-Italian polymath, whose wide-ranging practice encompassed painting, writing and music. In the early 20th century, he played a fundamental role in the development of Metaphysical art, alongside his older brother Giorgio de Chirico. Souvenir will present Savinio as both a postmodern intellectual avant la lettre, and as an artist of the future. Developed in close collaboration with the Archivio Alberto Savinio and the artist's estate, and with the guidance of a scientific committee composed of experts of Savinio's work, the retrospective will bring together approximately 75 artworks between paintings and drawings from the mid-1920s to the early 1950s from institutions and collections across Italy and Europe. Alberto Savinio moved effortlessly between disciplines and forms of expression. As such, Alberto Savinio. Souvenir presents a journey that goes beyond simply retracing the artist's stylistic development, exploring instead the principal themes of his poetics and highlighting the continuity of an artistic inquiry centered on memory, myth, imagination, and irony. Through a sequence of thematic sections, the exhibition reveals Savinio's conception of art as an intellectual activity: a process of transformation that, starting from reality and its fragments, creates new images capable of unveiling their hidden meaning. Many of the themes explored by Savinio resonate strongly with contemporary culture, from interspecies relations and posthumanism to philosophical perspectives that challenge the distinction between subject and object. Equally striking is the relevance of his artistic practice. Savinio's technique of the "painted collage", where rather than creating original images, he would focus on selecting, recombining, and transforming existing visual sources, emerged at a time when photography and print culture were making images more widely accessible than ever before. In doing so, he anticipated artistic strategies that would become widespread only decades later, while raising questions about originality, authorship, and the circulation of images that remain remarkably relevant in today's age of digital archives and artificial intelligence.Alberto Savinio. Souvenir will be accompanied by a major catalogue produced in collaboration with Mousse Publishing, marking the first institutional publication on the artist's work in English. It will include seven newly commissioned essays by leading scholars and curators, color plates of all the works in the exhibition –a selection of which will be accompanied by focus texts –and a complete chronological apparatus presenting Alberto Savinio within the historical and geographic context in which he operated, intertwining his personal life with his parallel careers in music, literature, and visual art. The catalogue will feature contributions by Marie de Brugerolle, Nicoletta Cardano, Giovanni Casini, Luciano Chessa, Ester Coen, Stefano Collicelli Cagol, Sarah Cosulich, Giorgio Di Domenico, Nicol Maria Mocchi, Effie Rentzou, Pietro Rigolo, Maria Eugenia Rossi, Raphaële Sevrain, and Irina Zucca Alessandrelli.