From 11 to 30 July 2019 the Fondazione Stelline hosts the exhibition The fire of the Earth. Annunziata Scipione, the second stage of an exhibition project dedicated to Annunziata Scipione (1928 - 2018), one of the most interesting exponents of contemporary Italian naїf, from many considered true heir of Antonio Ligabue.
Among the greatest admirers of Scipione was the great writer and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, who loved to call it "peasant artist" and who recognized it as "a fundamental dialectality which (...) has the value of a created language". The Abruzzese artist powerfully represents the collective unconscious of a community, its need to recognize itself in archetypes, traditions, continuity that form a horizon of meaning, and fuses it with its own desire of belonging to a place, of rooting in a land, of searching for a horizon in which to situate oneself.
It is the affirmation of the value of places, memory and identity.
The exhibition itinerary presents around fifty works including paintings and sculptures and is accompanied by the most important publication to date ever produced on Scipione: a rich monograph (edited by Silvia Pegoraro, with texts by the curator and Valentina Muzii, accompanied by a critical anthology) which presents almost 450 works, constituting the first general catalog of the artist. The exhibition and editorial project therefore proposes a double path through the entire work of Annunziata Scipione, from 1968 to the most recent expressive phase, which ended only a few months before her death on 24 April 2018.
Scipione's artistic work began to take shape in a systematic way between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s (the first sculptures date back to 1968 and began painting in '72). "For the relatively late assertion of his artistic inclination, his story is akin to that of the most famous of the naїf American artists: Anna Mary Robertson Moses, known as Grandma Moses (1860-1961), whose paintings have been exhibited in most important American museums, including the MoMa in New York ", as Silvia Pegoraro writes. «Annunziata Scipione is, perhaps, placed at the extreme limit of the naїve area, due to the complexity of her vision and to the anthropological-cultural reflection that appears to be underlying. His works speak to us of the strength and richness of a female personality who has pursued with vigor and serene determination the affirmation of her most authentic and profound vocation, "continues the curator.
The artist's immense pictorial work also constitutes a sort of encyclopedic diary of the customs, work activities, secular and religious traditions of the archaic-rural society of the places where she was born and lived, very similar, after all, to those from all over Italy until the post-war period. A "documentary" that takes shape in fairytale colors, although pervaded by a solid and crystalline sense of the real and belonging to one's own land.