ST. MORITZ.- St. Moritz Art Masters presents the group exhibition 'Italian Journey: Art from the 1960s' at the St. Moritz Dorfkirche – Protestant Church. Showcasing some 20 works by a who’s who of 1960s Italian art, the exhibition introduces one of the most prolific and lively art eras of 20th century Italy.

The exhibition is conceived as an ideal “journey” across Italian Art of the 1960s, featuring protagonists of visual creativity that interpret the different and intertwined identities of main cultural centres of this crucial decade: Milan, Rome and Turin. It aims at presenting the multifaceted identity of this “golden age” of Italy, which expresses itself not only in visual art, but – in connection and parallel to it – in many other fields: from industry to architecture, from design to fashion, from literature to theatre and cinema, from photography to music.

Artists who are active in Milan around the core presence of Lucio Fontana, such as Piero Manzoni, Enrico Castellani, Agostino Bonalumi, Dadamaino, Gianni Colombo and Paolo Scheggi, are characterized by the investigation of a new idea of space, through the redefinition of painting: creating works between the zeroing of the surface and the possibilities of unexpected colour–shape relationships.

In Rome, parallel to the dialectics between Alberto Burri’s research in matters and Piero Dorazio’s investigations of surfaces, the artistic context is also more directly linked to mass media communication and cinema. In a more iconic approach, icons of visual and mass culture, both from of the new age of consumerism and from the historical roots of Italian identity (from Michelangelo to Futurism), are interpreted, as in the works by Mario Schifano, Mimmo Rotella, Franco Angeli, Tano Festa, and Pino Pascali.

In Turin, the crucial investigations by Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio leads to the experimentation of raw materials and unorthodox techniques: together with a persistent interdisciplinary focus, this gives birth to the complex context of Arte Povera, characterized by unconventional and conceptual practices, performance, installation, with artists such as Alighiero Boetti, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Giuseppe Penone, Giovanni Anselmo, Mario Merz, parallel to the frameless painting by Giorgio Griffa.The ramified and multiple perspective in Italian identity belongs to the history and culture of the country, from as early as the Middle Ages, through the Renaissance and the Baroque and into the Modern. Crucial centres of experimentation in the Italian 1960s are presented in the exhibition, featuring their different and specific cultural “textures”.