Regina. Della scultura

In 2021 Lorenzo Giusti co-curated with Chiara Gatti the first retrospective in an Italian museum dedicated to Regina Cassolo Bracchi, in art Regina (May 21, 1894 – September 14, 1974), one of the most fascinating, innovative, and to this day lesser-known figures of the European artistic panorama of the twentieth century. The exhibition arises from the purchase  by the GAMeC and the Centre Pompidou of Paris of a major set of works by the artist, and – from her debut in the 1920s through to the early 1970s – aims to analyze the formal reflection of a unique personality, one who has wrongly remained in the margins of history and who has now been rediscovered as a complex, experimental, versatile, and poetic figure. Born in Mede Lomellina, the daughter of a butcher and orphaned at a young age,Regina was the first woman of the Italian vanguard to focus entirely on sculpture, of which she reinterpreted the language in a daring and experimental manner, drawing on academic and naturalistic research and applying it to her original use of materials. Aluminum, iron wire, sandpaper, tin, and tinplate were the favored media in a constant compositional and expressive investigation which initially embraced the sphere of Futurism (in 1934 she undersigned the Manifesto tecnico dell’aeroplastica futurista) and then that of the MAC, the ‘Movimento arte concreta’ (1948), which Regina approached in 1951 through Bruno Munari.

The exhibition has featured a monograph, published by GAMeC Books and Éditions du Centre Pompidou, with essays by Christine Macel, Lorenzo Giusti, Chiara Gatti, Paolo Campiglio, and Paolo Sacchini, graphic concept by Leonardo Sonnoli and Irene Bacchi, and a photographic project by Delfino Sisto Legnani. The exhibition display was curated by the designer Francesco Faccin.