“Officina San Lorenzo” was a group of Roman artists working in improvised studios in the disused spaces of the former Cerere pasta factory. The district was San Lorenzo, and the period the end of the 1970s.

Over the years, the term “Officina San Lorenzo” has been used to identify the work of Bruno Ceccobelli, Gianni Dessì, Giuseppe Gallo, Nunzio, Pizzi Cannella and Marco Tirelli. Drawn together not by a programme but by a shared form of poetics, these artists placed painting and sculpture at the centre of the way they worked. They encouraged individual responsibility, the exercise of invention which regains vigour where it can be measured with a shared language, and the rehabilitation of discredited concepts of the uniqueness and autonomy of a work.
With the “Contemporary Italy. Officina San Lorenzo” exhibition, curated by Daniela Lancioni, between 16th May and 27th September 2009, Mart will explore a movement that imposed itself on the international stage between the 1980s and early 1990s, and which represents an importortant contribution to the renewal of painting and sculpture in Italy.

The Mart exhibition investigates their artistic research, with a total of over 50 works – sculptures, paintings and settings – dating from between 1979 and 2008. Among these works, there will be “Morpheus” and “Loggia” (1979) by Bruno Ceccobelli, both of which from the Groninger Museum; the painting by Gallo entitled “Incantato” of 1983, the first in which appears the emblematic figure of the wise old man; the sculptures of Nunzio that won him the prize for young art at the Venice Biennale in 1986. Among the works by Tirello will be the first large “Untitled” painting on paper of 1989. A “Camera picta” by Gianni Dessì (1991) will be rebuilt, while some of the most commited pictures from the main painterly cycles of Pizzi Cannella will also be exhibited, from the “Abiti” (“Clothes”) to “Ferri battuti” (“Wrought iron”), and from the “Bagni turchi” (“Turkish baths”) to the “Polittici” (“Polyptychs”).

Jump the queue and buy your ticket in advance on the web!

Buying in advance: booking incurs a reservation fee of €1 per person.

Alternatively: it is worth remembering that you can buy in advance using a banker’s draft, calling free phone number 800 - 397760 (from Italy only), or ++390424600435 from abroad.

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