The exhibition PIPPO RIZZO. Palermo/ Rome round trip, curated by Nicoletta Boschiero and Giulia Gueci, which opens at the National Gallery on Thursday 30 November, tells the dynamic path of a versatile artist such as Pippo Rizzo (Corleone 1897 – Palermo 1964) who, by his own definition 'restless', he found his coherence in change, that is, the essence of his stylistic code. Through the archive material - documents, books and unpublished photographs from the Pippo Rizzo Fund, recently donated to the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art - and thanks to the dialogue with the works of other twentieth-century artists similar to him, the exhibition process brings out the centrality of the Palermo/Rome axis in the definition of Rizzo's language.

In fact, the exhibition highlights how the constant movements from one city to another - from his very first training at the end of the 1910s to the last years of his life as director of the Academy of Fine Arts - have determined not only inspirations and creative solicitations in the artist, but also a real relational network, which will be crucial for the cultural atmosphere of the time, allowing the diffusion in Sicily first of Futurism and then of the twentieth century current. Pippo Rizzo was in fact the theoretical and practical fulcrum of this network, acting as a bridge between Sicily and the rest of Italy, as a stimulator of connections and cultural exchanges.

The exhibition layout aims to highlight the activity of Pippo Rizzo primarily as a leader of Futurism in Sicily, connecting his experience to a broader national dimension, i.e. placing attention on the analogies of the contemporary experiments of other protagonists of the Movement, from Balla to Depero, from Prampolini to Bragaglia. Also recount "his" Thirties between the capital and Palermo, or his arrival at the current of the twentieth century, in particular the links with Sarfatti and the affinities with Carlo Carrà, but also his commitment as a critic, intellectual and promoter culture of those years, from his collaboration with the newspaper “L'Ora” to his role as Secretary of the Fascist Syndicate of Sicilian Artists.