Firenze Informale 1957-1963 | November 2023

Starting from the second half of the 1950s, non-figurative research influenced by European informal expressionism largely marked Florentine artistic and artisanal production. Galleries such as Numero, La Vigna Nuova, and even more so Quadrante between 1961 and 1964, supported local informal art by placing it within consolidated national and international contexts. This trend passed through the work of painters, sculptors, architects, and also profoundly influenced the artisanal production of ceramics, leather, enamels and iron and more generally of the many local manufacturers that in that period were exporting their products all over the world. Overall, this movement towards the informal defined a corpus of experiences that were anything but homogeneous, which ran out in a few years, and were definitively interrupted with the flood of 1966 and the consequent closure of many galleries, shops and ateliers. What remains of this production is a substantial corpus of works characterized by an important expressionism of shapes, colors and materials, which sometimes borders on organicism, others on gesturalism or brutalism. The work of profoundly different painters can be traced back to this varied corpus, such as Alberto Moretti, Mario Fallani, Giorgio Ferrero, Vinicio Berti, Riccardo Guarneri; architects such as Leonardo Ricci and Vittorio Giorgini; sculptors such as Pierluca degli Innocenti and Marcello Fantoni; ceramic producers such as La Cava (in the production of Bruno Brunetti and Mario Nuti), up to Piero Santi’s enamels for VNF. Within a larger collection of works and documents relating to this short but intense season, Simone Begani exhibits a selection of pieces representative of the multiple trajectories, with the aim of showing the common tension towards overcoming form, geometry and measure.