Henri Matisse is one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, but paradoxically, an important part of his production is still overlooked. The figure of Matisse the sculptor is, in fact, not known in the most subtle aspects of his research. Although painting has always remained his main expressive modality, "his" language and the form of investigation of the visible to which he dedicated himself throughout his life, Matisse simultaneously conducted a reflection on sculpture (and also on engraving) which makes he is one of the most complete artists of the last century. His versatility explored various techniques simultaneously, with curiosity and keen experimentation. Against the background of this multifaceted intelligence, Matisse's sculptural work reveals a parallel life to that of the colourist, a double soul devoted to matter, volume, space, which deserves to be placed in relation - in terms of processes and goals – with that of other great sculptors of the 20th century, heirs of Auguste Rodin's lesson and who became geniuses of the avant-garde. From Brancusi to Giacometti, from Boccioni to Wotruba.

For the first time in Italy, the MAN Museum today dedicates an exhibition to the sculpture of Henri Matisse. The exhibition project, curated by Chiara Gatti, rereads and adapts to the spaces of the Sardinian museum, the new and complex concept of the Matisse Métamorphoses exhibition organized in 2019 by the Kunsthaus of Zurich and the Matisse Museum of Nice. A project intended to rethink Matisse, to reconsider the role of his work in the art panorama of the first half of the 20th century, in the light of a broader aesthetic research which sees sculpture as the vehicle for new and revolutionary formal solutions. In this necessary insight, it emerges that the human figure in particular was the main theme of his tension towards synthesis. From the investigation of the body, posture, gesture or physiognomy, Matisse developed a path of geometric reduction of the image which led him towards an abstraction bordering on the radical. As the artist himself stated in 1908 in his Notes d'un peintre: «what interests me most is neither the still life nor the landscape, it is the figure». The figure, not for its pathos, its lyricism, moods or existential inflection, but for its sense of presence in space and its ideal evolution over time. In fact, Matisse questioned the body in its relationship with the immediate environment and with the changing circumstances over a long period of time. Here then is the evolution of a naturalistic fact into a final synthesis that sublimates contingency into a dimension of absolute perfection. Space conditions, in turn, a system of subtle relationships between physical substance and inhabited void, between gestures and the dynamic lines that they draw in the air.