The MA*GA Museum hosts a wide retrospective revolving around the figure of Vassily Kandinsky, one of the pioneers of abstract art.

Curated by Emma Zanella and Elisabetta Barisoni, designed and realized by the MA*GA Museum and the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna di Ca’ Pesaro, the exhibition will focus on the centrality of the work and thought of the Russian master in relation to the European scene and, in particular, to the great season of Italian abstractionism that developed between the thirties and fifties of the twentieth century.

Through 130 works, including masterpieces from Ca’ Pesaro, the MA*GA Museum, prestigious public and private collections, the birth of abstract art and its European and Italian evolution will be retraced, still alive and present in contemporary creative language today.


The exhibition opens with a first broad section aimed at presenting the international cultural context, as it developed between the twenties and thirties of the last century, when Kandinsky, with his lessons at the Bauhaus, influenced the development of painting thanks to the open dialogue with the great masters of European Abstractionism such as Paul Klee, Jean Arp, Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Antoni Tàpies, who defined the birth and persistence of abstract art from the early decades of the Historical Avant-gardes to the fifties of the twentieth century, in Europe and Italy.

In the second section, the exhibition continues with an in-depth analysis of the deep and controversial relationship between Kandinsky and Italian artists: fundamental is the personal exhibition dedicated to him at the Galleria del Milione in Milan in 1934, an occasion for reflection and debate among Italian artists opposed to the dominant figuration. The birth and persistence of abstract art, from the Historical Avant-gardes to the Fifties, are reflected in the languages of Lucio Fontana, Osvaldo Licini, Fausto Melotti, Manlio Rho, Enrico Prampolini, Atanasio Soldati, and Luigi Veronesi.


In the post-war period, Kandinsky's thought and work remained at the center of the Italian scene thanks above all to some important exhibitions such as Arte astratta e concreta in 1947 in Milan, Arte Astratta in Italia in 1948 in Rome, and to movements and groups such as Forma (1947), MAC (1948), Origine (1951), which brought younger artists closer to the historical masters, eager to grasp in Kandinsky the key to autonomously enter a new visual world. This is the subject of the third and final section of the exhibition, with works by Carla Accardi, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Piero Dorazio, Roberto Sebastián Matta, Achille Perilli, Antonio Sanfilippo, Emilio Vedova.