The exhibition "Giovanni Novaresio" will be inaugurated on Friday 1st December at 4.30 pm, at the Museo Civico di Sanremo, in Palazzo Nota. His Africa 1954-1980 ".

The exhibition will bring for the first time in western Liguria the works of the artist Giovanni Novaresio, master of the Genoese avant-garde. Since 1954, Novaresio has been repeatedly living in Somalia, which becomes his second homeland: the works that most distinguish the artist are unquestionably linked to this land. His young solid and vague somali, his noble shepherds in rough clothes, his elegant and primitive maternities, his photographs that resume civilizations now disappeared, all his "Africa" ​​relives in this exhibition of great evocative power. The installation in Palazzo Nota rooms includes paintings, drawings, photographs, among which many unpublished works, and the precious sketches for the decoration of the Great Hall of the University of Mogadishu, the only surviving testimony to the destruction of the building.
The exhibition, curated by Claudia Andreotta, Leo Lecci and Giovanna Novaresio, will remain open from December 1 to January 20 (Opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday 9 am-7pm, last admission 6.30 pm, info: ufficio.museocivico@comunedisanremo. it; www.facebook.com/GiovanniNovaresio; www.giovanni-novaresio.it).

At the La Mongolfiera Art Gallery (via Roma 50, Sanremo) a series of lithographs and works by Giovanni Novaresio can be viewed throughout the exhibition.

THE EXHIBITION

Thanks to the collaboration between the Municipality of Sanremo and the Contemporary Art Archives (AdAC) of the University of Genoa, it was possible to present again in this exhibition the African experience of Novaresio in its completeness and complexity: the artist, although he left Somalia in the 1960s, he would continue for another twenty years to repropose in his works the memory of this land. Novaresio never tells a "postcard" country, but translates the deep reality of Somalia into a language that unites emotion and formal synthesis. The selection of the works, dated from the Fifties to the Eighties, makes it possible to follow the evolution of the African theme, from the very personal experiments of Novaresio in the wake of postcubism to the softer forms, where a certain attention to the descriptive detail re-emerges.

The artist's production finds in the historic rooms of Palazzo Nota not only a harmonious collocation, but also an ideal continuity with the permanent collection of the museum which houses a large number of contemporary Ligurian artists, such as Giannetto Fieschi, a pupil of Novaresio himself.

BIOGRAPHY

Giovanni Novaresio was born in Naples in 1919. He moved to Genoa where he attended the Ligustica Academy of Fine Arts in 1934. He took an active part in the Resistance and in 1945 he founded the Genoa and the Isola gallery with the sculptor Sandro Cherchi. post-war period, for avant-garde artists in the Ligurian capital. The sudden decision to leave for Somalia marks a decisive turning point in his artistic career, making the production of the artist unique, so much so that he becomes for all John the African. From 1939 to 1997, the year of his death, he exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad. In 2013, the exhibition Old & New A Zimbabwean Italian Tale at the National Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography "Lugi Pigorini" of Rome brought for the first time in Italy the drawings with which Novaresio documented the construction of the Kariba dam, exhibited in 1960 in Salisbury ( Southern Rhodesia). The staff set up in 2014 at the Museum of the Ligurian Academy of Fine Arts in Genoa, has brought the figure of Giovanni Novaresio back to a precise identity and historical-artistic contextualization.