Futurism means art of the future, and it is among the avant-gardes of the 20th century that is most animated by a revolutionary feeling of renewal, rebellion against tradition and faith in the possibilities offered by the future and its technical innovations.
The artists of the first generation – Umberto Boccioni, and then Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Antonio Sant’Elia, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini – wanted to reawaken figurative art that was often still bound to religious and mythological subjects far removed from reality.
Futurism breaks the mould of the past and becomes the forerunner of the ideas and experiences of Dadaism, the Russian avant-gardes and the neo-avant-gardes of the second half of the 20th century. It became the interpreter of a true artistic revolution that idealised a ‘total’ work of art capable of transcending the too narrow confines of painting and sculpture.
The more than 100 works on show span a chronological period from 1910, the year of the movement’s foundation, to 1915, when the publication of the Manifesto of the Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe and Italy’s entry into the war marked a watershed in the movement’s artistic research.
Exceptional works, some of them unpublished or rarely exhibited, from galleries, museums and international collections, a truly unique corpus that already defines the prestige of the exhibition.