For their second group show, Tornabuoni Art London leaves the abstraction of Lucio Fontana and Arnaldo Pomodoro to focus on the socially engaged and figurative movement of Italian Pop Art.
By regrouping works by Mario Schifano, Mimmo Rotella, Franco Angeli and the other exponents of the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo movement, Tornabuoni Art aims to explore the reaction of Italian artists to their own popular culture. These artists were concerned with the same notions of mass culture and mechanical reproduction as their American counterparts, but through the spectrum of Italian culture. “We wanted to provide a counterpoint to Italian post-war abstraction and the Milanese avant-garde that we typically show at Tornabuoni Art, and present a different side to the Italian 1960s, one driven by Rome and by the people’s relationship to Italian culture and the ‘Dolce Vita’ ” said Tornabuoni‘s director Ursula Casamonti.
The exhibition builds on the The World Goes Pop, recently on show at the Tate Modern, and focuses on the unique conjecture where high and low culture met within the rapidly commercialising world of the 1960s – 1980s.
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