From 20 April to 15 September 2024
Ca' Pesaro inaugurates the new 2024 exhibition season with a major exhibition dedicated to Armando Testa (1917-1992). Already present since December 2022 in the Venetian civic collections with 17 works, the brilliant Piedmontese creative will be at the center of a monographic exhibition that will allow us to discover and rediscover previously unpublished aspects of his production.
From its beginnings in Turin at the Vigliardi Paravia Typographic School and with the teaching of Ezio D'Errico, the exhibition aims to reconstruct the artistic path of a protagonist of contemporary visual culture, creator of famous icons that have entered our collective imagination for years. His masterpieces are the result of a plurality of expressive languages, experimented over the course of his more than thirty-year career, whose modernity is today a source of inspiration for contemporary artists and which has led the aesthetics scholar Gillo Dorfles to define him as a "global visualizer".
The first competition, won by Armando Testa at the age of twenty for ICI (Industria Colori Inchiostri) in 1937, was accompanied by the research carried out in the immediate post-war period for important companies such as Martini & Rossi, Carpano, Borsalino and Pirelli, from which some of his most brilliant and iconic inventions. And again, the advertisements, promotional campaigns and logos for Lavazza, Sasso, Carpano, Simmenthal and Lines, among others, which have accompanied several generations of spectators, users, artists and creatives, will be enriched by Testa's suggestions for national public occasions , like the 1960 Rome Olympics, for which he created the official poster by winning a competition marked by complex events.
The fifties and sixties saw the birth of images and animations for television, with characters, sounds and gestures that have remained in the history of advertising and international culture: from the Antonetto digestif (1960) to the famous red sphere suspended above the half sphere of Punt e Mes, which in Piedmontese dialect means "a point and a half" (1960); from Caballero and Carmencita for Lavazza's Paulista coffee (1965) to the imaginative inhabitants of the planet Papalla for Philco televisions (1966); from Pippo, the blue hippopotamus of Lines diapers (1966-1967), to the advertisements for Sasso oil (1968) and Peroni beer (1968).
The research around the theme of food, seen in its eclectic and even ironic declinations, will be accompanied in the exhibition by activities linked to social issues and cultural diffusion in which Armando Testa did not fail to engage, such as the campaigns for Amnesty International, for the referendum on divorce, poverty and world hunger, to name just a few.
Santa Croce, 2076, Venice, Italy
Opening hours
opens - closes | last entry | |
monday | Closed now | |
tuesday | 10:00 - 18:00 | |
wednesday | 10:00 - 18:00 | |
thursday | 10:00 - 18:00 | |
friday | 10:00 - 18:00 | |
saturday | 10:00 - 18:00 | |
sunday | 10:00 - 18:00 |