The NMNM is presenting the first Alfredo Volpi retrospective by a public institution outside Brazil. From Friday 9 February to Sunday 20 May, from 10 am to 6 pm Nouveau Musée National - Villa Paloma
This great Brazilian painter, who was born in 1896 in Lucca, Italy, arrived in São Paulo in 1898, when his family moved to the Italian quarter of Cambuci. Alfredo Volpi died in 1988 in São Paulo.
The exhibition
retraces his entire career, from his first oil paintings from the 1940s -
mainly natural and urban landscapes - to his works of the 1950s, 1960s and
1970s, which transformed the same subjects into colourful geometric
compositions, dreamlike archetypes of facades and banners. This modest, poetic
"algorithm" enables Volpi to create infinite variations of tones on
the same theme.
The NMNM is exhibiting more than 70
works that tell the story of this independent self-taught painter, who was fascinated
by the beginnings of the Italian Renaissance and by Matisse, Morandi and
popular culture, earning him, with Di Cavalcanti, the National Prize for
Painting at the second São Paulo Biennale. Volpi aroused the interest of the famous English critic
Herbert Read, who described him as an artist who was "aware of the
movement but able to create contemporary works on a local theme, the shapes and
colours of modern Brazilian architecture."
©Slider : Alfredo Volpi Sans titre, 1962 Huile sur toile - 142x265 cm Collection Mastrobuono, São Paulo
Alfredo Volpi Sans titre, 1955 Tempera sur toile - 54 x 73 cm Collection privée, São Paulo
Alfredo Volpi dans son Studio, années 1970 - Courtesy Instituto Alfredo Volpi de Arte Moderna