The MIC Faenza celebrates the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Germano Sartelli (1925-2014) with "Alphabets of Earth," an exhibition set up in the Project Room dedicated to a series of works made with terracotta, which opens on Friday, May 16, at 6:00 pm, in the presence of art critic Claudio Spadoni, Diego Galizzi director of the San Domenico Museum in Imola, and Marzia Sartelli from the Sartelli Archive.

The exhibition engages in dialogue with the retrospective, curated by Claudio Spadoni, running until July 13, 2025 at the San Domenico Museum in Imola, which tells the entire artistic journey of Sartelli: from the early collages to the latest worked papers.

In his varied and extraordinary artistic journey, Sartelli used various humble and unusual materials in artistic practice, recycled and reused in unexpected ways, with a deep feeling towards nature and small things. Cobwebs, leaves, earth, rusted and carved sheets of metal, broken glass, cigarette butts, gauze, tree trunks, and papers are the protagonists of a careful reflection and a unique poetry, linked to the themes of poverty and precursors of current environmental reflections.

The works on display in Faenza are selected with the Sartelli Archive, which in 2024 inaugurated, ten years after his passing, the Casa Museo Laboratorio on the hills of Imola, his place of life, now included in the list of "Houses and studios of illustrious people of Emilia-Romagna."

Andrea Emiliani, a great admirer of the artist, affectionately called him a "provincial theater trovarobe," a dowser who embraces nature with ever-new eyes, making it relive, capturing the minute details that, when amplified, tell new universes, new possibilities, already expressed in the 1950s with a series of informal works.

His artistic research intertwines with a path that leads him to collaborate for over thirty years with the Psychiatric Hospital of Imola, where he sets up a painting workshop, a precursor of an innovative model of caring for vulnerabilities, connecting to international experiences in the clinical and medical fields.

In 1962, he received the sculpture award from the Ministry of Public Education, and in 1964, he was invited to the XXXII Venice Biennale. Over the years, he exhibited in various public and private settings, favoring his solitary privacy.