MAGDALO MUSSIO. MARGINALIA

curated by Paola Ballesi

Villa Colloredo Mels
Recanati (MC)
22 October –30 November 2016

Ten years after the death of Magdalo Mussio, Recanati Town Council in cooperation with the Luigi Di Sarro Centre for Documentation of Contemporary Artistic Research in Rome and Spazio Cultura Association in Recanati pay tribute to the artist with the Magdalo Mussio Retrospective, Marginalia, to be opened on 22 October 2016 in Recanati in the Villa Colloredo Mels Town Museum.
Paintings, artist’s books, rare editions, posters, and animated films recount the extraordinary adventure of the Tuscan artist who moved to the Marches.
Among the most incisive and authoritative artists of the neoavanguardia, Magdalo Mussio made an indelible mark on the cultural landscape of our country with his literary and publishing exploits. These were performed in parallel with his artistic practice and with his longstanding teaching commitments at the Fine Arts Academy in Macerata, the memory of which is easily accessible through some of his pupils, who today are emerging artists.
Rooted in the European cultures of the sixties, Magdalo Mussio was one of the main exponents of verbo-visual art that embraced poetry, painting, music, typographic art and cinema in a boundless exploration which often ventured into unknown territory and never failed to follow through right to the end.
His long career was richly recognised and important exhibitions were held in New York, Tokyo, Montreal, Sydney, Paris, Milan, Rome, Genoa and many other cities. Magdalo Mussio’s “I poemi visivi”, as Gillo Dorfles called them, are exhibited at the Finch Museum in New York (“Italian Visual Poetry”), at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (“Identitè Italienne: l’Art en Italie depuis 1959”) and in other prestigious Italian galleries.
The artist’s complexity and his multidisciplinary talent are documented in the exhibition, including the vast amount of work on paper and board, screening of the animated films Il potere del drago (1971), Il reale dissoluto (1972), Umanomeno (1973) and the video interview Detto tra noi (1986), and lastly a section dedicated to his publishing activity.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue-book published by Quodlibet that reconstructs the complex story of Magdalo Mussio as a total artist, with contributions from many scholars and experts, as well as testimonies from those who came into contact with the creative activities and development path of his life.


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