Italian Pop Art Exhibition at Galerie St-John in Ghent

The Galerie St-John in Ghent, Belgium, presents 'Italian Pop Art around 1970. Emilio Tadini, Keizo Morishita & friends', running until December 29, 2024. The exhibition is held in a converted 18th-century chapel, St-Jan in d’Olie, acquired in 1980 by Leo Steel and now run by his children Emmy and Raf Steel, who curated the show. It focuses on Italian Pop artists Emilio Tadini and Keizo Morishita, alongside Gianfranco Pardi, Enrico Baj, Valerio Adami, Alik Cavaliere, and Marco Roncada. The works come from a private collection assembled between the late 1960s and early 1970s by Richard Foncke, and most have never been publicly shown since their initial display. The exhibition highlights connections between Italian artists and Belgium, particularly through Galerie Richard Foncke in Ghent and Studio Marconi in Milan. Tadini, a Milanese intellectual, poet, and artist, influenced Flemish avant-garde abstraction. His works include series 'Copertina per un settimanale' and 'Color & Co.', and the painting 'Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe' (1970), which references Monet and Manet. Morishita evokes Pop Art's 1964 Venice Biennale debut and Marcel Duchamp through his series 'Avec Marcel Duchamp' and 'La Géographie', addressing conflict and war in 1968. His first exhibition was at Galerie Foncke in Ghent in 1969. The show also features Pardi's geometric works, Baj's visual and semantic games, and Roncada's colorful canvases placed in the exit corridor.