The City Museum of Rovereto presents the exhibition "Baldessari futurist", curated by Maurizio Scudiero with a rich selection of works, some of which are unpublished, covering a wide range of experimentation by Roberto Marcello Baldessari, also known as "Iras", a pseudonym that takes the last letters of the surname read backwards.

"It can be said that Baldessari returns to the "scene of the crime" - as curator Maurizio Scudiero puts it - because exactly 60 years ago, in 1964, the first exhibition on Baldessari futurist was held at the Pinacoteca Civica. And it is precisely the Civic Museum, in the headquarters of the City Museum, that hosts his return, in a very extensive exhibition, in rooms divided by themes, from abstraction, to the bar and cabaret, to portraits, to the machine and speed, to war, to landscape, to avant-gardes"

"This was an exhibition that the Civic Museum had been working on for a long time - comments the president Giovanni Laezza - not only to enhance an important artist for the city of Rovereto, but also the civic collection, a collection that belongs to the City of Rovereto and therefore, in fact, to all its citizens, and which preserves about 200 works by Baldessari, including paintings, engravings, and drawings. What better place, then, for an exhibition like this. A result achieved also thanks to multiple collaborations and alliances with institutions and private lenders, first and foremost with the Mart"

A highly anticipated exhibition, 13 years after the last temporary exhibition dedicated to the artist dating back to 2011, the exhibition at the City Museum is the result of many valuable alliances of the Civic Museum Foundation with various institutions, first and foremost with the Mart, as well as with private collectors, and brings the focus back on the art, culture, and ideas of one of the most revolutionary movements of the twentieth century.

An artist endowed with a remarkable technique, both for oil paintings and pastels as well as mixed techniques, but also a very solid draftsman, Baldessari is now rightly placed among the greats of his time.

Of extreme interest is the variety of media proposed in the 70 exhibited works: 55 paintings, in addition to three valuable sculptures, engravings, and pastels.

The contribution of the civic art collection, now managed and preserved by the Civic Museum Foundation, is important, which includes in the collection about 200 works, twenty paintings as well as numerous engravings and drawings from Baldessari's figurative period.

The period considered in the exhibition path ranges from the first essays of abstraction in 1915, i.e. the years after the artist's academic training, through the beginnings of Futurism, with a return to post-academic figurative art from 1924, to the last Futurist period linked to aeropainting from 1934 to 1937.

The exhibition, in the idea of curator Maurizio Scudiero, does not follow a typical chronological progression, but follows a thematic division according to the subjects that the artist has interpreted the most throughout his career, both by vocation and because they are more functional to the discourse of Futurism.