ROVERETO.- With the presentation of The Collections, the Mart explores over a century of history of Italian and international art. The greatest masterpieces of the museum collections are shown in a display that is strongly coherent with the architecture of Mario Botta. The Mart confirms itself as a great educational machine, whose strengths are the dialogue with the general public and the quality of its cultural offerings.

The Mart’s collection, built up over the years thanks to a far-sighted policy of acquisitions, loans and donations, today comprises approximately 20,000 works. The new layout offers an art-historical itinerary set out chronologically with thematic diversions stressing the great continuity between trends, schools and the currents that have characterised the history of art since the end of the 19th century. The Mart invites visitors to learn about the perimeters of art and go beyond them, through the 20th century and its movements: the avant-garde trends and Futurism on the one hand, and the archaic tendencies and metaphysical schools on the other, exploring the breakthroughs in the research of the latter half of the century and the politics, and on to the experimentation of the present scene and the new media.

The display project, which will be permanent, with regular changes, additions and rotations, is divided into two sections: The invention of the modern and The incursion of the contemporary.Starting with some nineteenth-century precursors (Medardo Rosso), we enter the twentieth century, the stage for the breakthroughs of the avant-garde movements with tradition on the one hand, and the revival of this same tradition on the other.

The rooms dedicated to the Futurists Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, Luigi Russolo, Fortunato Depero and Enrico Prampolini also contain some rare documents from the Mart’s archival holdings, which is also the venue for the Centro Internazionale Studi sul Futurismo. These are followed by Carlo Carrà, Giorgio de Chirico, Massimo Campigli, Alberto Savinio, Mario Sironi, Arturo Martini and Marino Marini. There are monographic diversions dedicated to such great masters as Felice Casorati, Giorgio Morandi, Osvaldo Licini e Fausto Melotti who close the itinerary, giving way to the The incursion of the contemporary, characterised by the breaking down of conceptual, physical and geographical limits to art.

From the studies of matter and spatial limitations, and on paint itself by Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana, Afro Basaldella and the early conceptualism of Piero Manzoni, we move on to the American approach to Pop art. This is followed by the work of Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman and the Italian responses of Mario Merz, Giovanni Anselmo and Vincenzo Agnetti, which are in turn followed by the eclectic research into images of Luigi Ontani and the Transavanguardia. We thus arrive at the present day, with works by new generations of artists in the in progress section of the Mart’s collections’ new layout