Gastone Novelli Retrospective at Ca' Pesaro, Venice

Ca' Pesaro in Venice presents a retrospective of Gastone Novelli (Vienna, 1925 – Milan, 1968) to mark the centenary of his birth. The exhibition features sixty works across eight rooms on the piano nobile, focusing on his most intense period from 1957 to 1968. Novelli, a key figure in post-war Italian painting, blended Informale, Neo-Dada, and visionary poetry, creating aniconic narratives with graffiti-like marks and invented alphabets. The show begins with his informal works from the magazine L'Esperienza Moderna, co-founded with Achille Perilli in 1957, then moves to the early 1960s where he achieved a coexistence of visual and verbal language, and concludes with politically charged works selected for his solo room at the 1968 Venice Biennale. Novelli participated in two controversial Biennales: 1964 (Pop Art dominance) with ten works (six on view), and 1968 (the dissent Biennale) with fourteen works (nine on view). His technique involves using canvas as a matrix for imprinting, erasing, and layering, with fragmented phrases and uneven scripts, sometimes cut from printed matter, as in 'Per ricordare la vita'. Works like 'Nascondersi vale la pena' show scratched letters. The exhibition also includes documentary material highlighting his intellectual relationships and two new donations to the civic collections: 'Era glaciale' (1958) and 'Allunga il passo amico mio' (1967).