Surprise: Max Pellegrini

OCTOBER 16 - JANUARY 26, 2014    

Surprise exhibition project focuses its attention on specific aspects of Turin art scene between the 1960s and 1970s. The protagonist of this fifth event is Max Pellegrini. Born in Turin in 1945, where he is still living and working, Pellegrini has attended the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti and the faculty of Architecture at the Polytechnic School in Turin, where he was professor of Urban Sociology.

In the opening exhibition at Il Punto, in 1966, and in the one of the following year at the Piper Club (Al Piper è la fine del mondo), Pellegrini expressed his views on the momentous relationship between photography and painting. Seeing those pictures today gives the chance to examine the specific connection between snapshot and pictorial image the artist experimented in the first series of his paintings, devoted to urban landscapes and female figures. Those contemporary icons were inserted into a decorative arabesque pattern, where the Art Nouveau reference was reinterpreted according to a modern Pop take by using acid and fluorescent colour schemes.

In the works selected for this exhibition – some of which shown for the first time – the theme of feminine beauty mingles with the evocation of culture in those years, where the new style in music, fashion, graphics was directly connected to radically changing relationships and attitudes.