RENATO BRUSCAGLIA: NEL SEGNO, Incisioni e libri d’artista 1950-1999

The task of enhancing, educating, and transmitting the history of graphic design that the Tito Balestra Foundation has for years onlus carries out nationwide, does not stop, and from March 26th to May 28th 2022, an important exhibition dedicated to Renato Bruscaglia, one of the protagonists of international graphic design in the second half of the 20th century and among the most distinguishable and prestigious Italian engravers, will be set up at the Madonna di Loreto Church adjacent to the Malatesta Castle. An acknowledged interpreter of landscape, his work broke away from the traditional naturalistic and figurative school by favoring the intaglio technique, specifically etching, to achieve a personal and innovative stylistic autonomy.
The exhibition, curated by Giuseppe Appella and Flaminio Balestra, in collaboration with The Renato Bruscaglia Archive and the MIG. International Museum of Graphics of Castronuovo Sant’Andrea, is a fitting tribute to the Urbino artist who, precisely through engraving, showed his character as a resourceful experimenter, constantly turned toward the contemporary but never forgetting Urbino and its landscape.

Prepared in the activities for the centenary of his birth, Bruscaglia’s anthological exhibition chronologically traces, through 43 engravings and 9 artist’s books dated 1950-1999, the story of a life lived in the space of the city-palace (Urbino) and its territory, in search of a harmony that fully combines seasons, fragments of reality, everyday chronicle, affections, hours, lights, thoughts, fixing them on sheets where the technique becomes procedure and language of a sign engraved on the zinc plate made a mirror of himself, of the silences of his own solitude. Views, portraits, nudes (Women in the Studio, 1951; The Wooded Shore, 1958-1963; Nodo d’orizzonte, 1969; Appennino minore, 1978; The Philosopher’s House, 1988; Edge of cliff, 1999) reread the history of engraving (from Rembrandt to Morandi) to deliver us a technical ability continually renewed by daily exercise, such as to allow him unprecedented modulations of signs directed toward the evocation of images returned to a new existence that the word, stopped in the notebooks, amplifies, like an echo, among the wide hills of Montefeltro. In that country-landscape, of which Eugenio De Signoribus writes in the beautiful poem dedicated to Bruscaglia, that “hands down its eternity in an engraved sign” from which “the universe space of our life” re-emerges.

On the website of ArteVarese, a portal entirely dedicated to art and culture in the province of Varese, you can read Mauro Bianchini’s interesting article about the exhibition.

Opening: Saturday, March 26th, 6 p.m.

Exhibition hours:
Tuesday through Sunday, 10.00 – 12.00 e 15.00 – 19.00

Info and reservations:
Phone: 0547665850
info@fondazionetitobalestra.org