Reviving this exhibition today will enable visitors to explore some of the problems and issues of recent culture, in particular the waning of certain rigid "compartmentalisations" typical of the 1970s, and the phenomenon inadequately dubbed "the return of painting".
By comparison with today, the successful and – at the time – unusual pairing may be interpreted as one of the founding expressions of the fluidity – as liberating as it is complex – that marks our own day.
The three artworks by Mario Merz shown at the Galleria dell'Oca in 1978 will be on display at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, together with the addition of another of his artworks that was being shown at the same time in Gian Enzo Sperone's gallery in Rome. Taken as a group, these artworks – of such importance that they are now on display in museums or are part of major international collections – offer a highly significant synthesis of the essential characteristics of this artist's work and of the materials and themes that we tend to find most frequently in his output, such as neon, Fibonacci's numbers, the igloo, wax, stuffed animals, bundles of firewood and images painted on canvas devoid of a stretcher frame.
In the Galleria dell'Oca exhibition, Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carrà, Giorgio de Chirico, Filippo de Pisis, Giorgio Morandi, Alberto Savinio and Gino Severini were all represented by works produced in their best and most prolific years, some from such legendary collections as that of Léonce Rosenberg – which supplied de Chirico's Chevaux se Cabrant (Horses Rearing) – others that had once formed part of the collections of leading art historians, such as Carrà’s Vele nel Porto (Sails in the Port) which still belongs to the Fondazione Roberto Longhi in Florence today. The Palazzo delle Esposizioni is hosting many of those same artworks, while it has been decided to replace those paintings whose current whereabouts it proved impossible to trace with others akin to the missing works in terms of both quality and date.
As in the first edition of Mostre in mostra, so in this instance too the criteria adopted to reconstruct the exhibition demand both a philological approach and a certain degree of approximation. The philological approach underpins the initiative and enables us to reconstruct the circumstances and the scope of the original exhibition, while approximation is of the essence when the project needs to be expanded to ensure that the exhibition is both complete and enjoyable. To quote the curator: "It is, after all, a segment of research that we are handing on to other scholars in the hope that they will be able to complete it and to enrich it."
The most important documents from Luisa Laureati Briganti's archive, on which the reconstruction of the exhibition is based, are available for consultation.