Fabio Mauri. The end

Exhibition catalogue

Artist and playwright, founder of two review magazines and prominent voice of the 1950s Italian Avant-guard, Mauri weaves together history and individual destiny in his work, which takes shape during the first eighteen years of his life: the war, the conversion, the madness, the dramatic experience of his Jewish friends who never came back, the discovery of real Fascism. Published for the first great institutional Milanese retrospective, the volume presents the never-changing central theme of the artist’s work: his reflection on art as ideological tension, as reference to the dramatic condition of man, torn between structure and matter, between form, image and history.

The itinerary is divided into three sections: the first, most intimate one presents a collection of drawings here displayed for the first time; the second is dedicated to Mauri’s most important installation; the last one gathers a rich selection of Schermi, the first monochromatic works realised by the artist at the end of the 1950s which were already a reference to cinema and present-day society.