Agostino Goldani's room

Opening: Friday November 14, from 6:30pm
On display from November 18 to December 19, 2014

The exhibition is a solo show: more or less fifty works representing an author known as one of the Master of Outsider Art in Italy.

After he went through many difficulties because of his poverty and war, Agostino Goldani retired into a little room where he started to paint hundreds of pieces using recycling paper, greetings cards, calendar papers, cuts of soap powder boxes, often used in front-retro (the dimensions are very small, between 3×3 centimeters to 20×40; the average size is 10×20 centimeters). For nearly thirty years, before dying in 1977 in a psychiatric hospital in Brescia (the only one hospitalization), Goldani was painting alone in his room where nobody was admitted except Sandrino, a neighbors child. On many works he writes Arte disperata” (Desperate Art) showing the exhistential need to express himself with colors and painting as if it was the only way to tell” his own interior torment. Silent or strained portraits, groups of figures overlapped one over the other unable to communicate, aggressive women and anthropomorphic animals, obsessive and scary landscapes: painting discovery is like a liberation for Roso (with this name he signed a lot of works), freeing him from the hypochondria caused by his suffering lifetime and by the difficulties of social reintegration.