On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Giacomo Balla, a personality of fundamental importance for the Italian art of the twentieth century, GAM dedicates an in-depth focus to one of the painter's most important works: Child x Balcony, which marks the transition from the previous Divisionist production to the research on movement that will have full development in the painter's futurist phase.

Umberto Boccioni already recognized in the works painted in 1912 the evident stylistic turning point of what his teacher had been in Rome, writing on January 1, 1913 to his friend Gino Severini: "He began four paintings of the movement (still realist) but incredibly advanced and very strange compared to a year ago. He was in Germany for two months and must have seen it intelligently. He admires us and shares our ideas in everything […] he has an almost virgin and intact will and the spectacle of his courageous evolution has moved me and Marinetti ”.

At the center of these works is the study of movement and in particular of “organic motion”, that is the rendering of the movement of a body, which includes reactions and contractions. Executed on the back of a canvas bearing a luminous landscape dating back to around 1897, still visible today, the painting depicts Balla's eldest daughter, Luce, running on the long balcony of the house, but the apparently everyday subject abandons any description of the details. The sensation of movement is rendered thanks to the repetition of the figure according to a precise rhythm, which determines its movement from left to right, while the interpenetration with the railing, the only environmental reference, superimposes the straight lines on the figure, amplifying the rhythm of the sequence. as the title suggests. Even the overlapping brushstrokes of color accentuate the elimination of the outlines and confer that sense of great chromatic brightness that characterizes the work. The use of bright and bright colors and the freedom of drafting are certainly a legacy of the pointillist season, but they also reflect the experiments following the trip to Düsseldorf in July 1912, when Balla was able to visit several exhibitions in which Fauvian works are exhibited.