From 17 December 2023 to 7 April 2024 the MA*GA of Gallarate hosts a retrospective dedicated to Dadamaino (Edoarda Emilia Maino, 1930-2004), one of the major protagonists of the avant-garde of the second half of the twentieth century, created in collaboration with the Dadamaino Archive, with the support of Galleria Arte Martinelli (Lodi, Miami Beach).

The exhibition, curated by Flaminio Gualdoni, retraces, through 80 works, the fundamental stages of the Milanese artist's career, starting from the debut of his research on monochrome painting and on the spatial surface of the canvas, which took place at the Prisma Gallery in 1959, the year in which Dadamaino abandons the informal to adopt those abstract formulations that will characterize his entire creative evolution.

The exhibition begins with the important cycle of Volumes, monochrome canvases open on large perforations. It was precisely in 1959 that the first Volume was presented, in the collective exhibition La donna nell'arte contemporari at the Brera Gallery in Milan, which immediately revealed the influence of Lucio Fontana on Dadamaino's work and conceptual and aesthetic reflections.

The first section of the exhibition puts the series of Volumes, created between 1958 and 1960, and that of Volumes with staggered modules, produced in the early sixties, into dialogue with the works from the MA*GA collection of Lucio Fontana, Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni, Giovanni Anceschi, Davide Boriani, Gianni Colombo, Enzo Mari, Getulio Alviani, Alberto Biasi.

The visual counterpoint highlights the importance that the association with the avant-garde group that was concentrated in Brera in the transition between the fifties and sixties had for Dadamaino's research. In fact, Dadamaino exhibits at the Azimut gallery in Milan where, in addition to the founders Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni, he meets the protagonists of a significant tranche of what can well be considered "the new artistic concept", as the second issue of the magazine "Azimuth" headlines.

Dadamaino's affirmation on the Italian art scene continued in the sixties with the collective Arte Programmata of 1962 at the Galleria La Cavana in Trieste, which defined his transition from spatial research on carved canvas to a study on color and the sign as a visual optical element .