Artist: Massimo Campigli

Galleria d’Arte Maggiore g.a.m. presents, at its Paris venue, the exhibition “Massimo Campigli. The Archaic Roots of the Contemporary”, curated by Alessia Calarota. The show brings together around fifteen works created between 1930 and 1962, tracing a path where Campigli’s painting takes center stage.

The uniqueness of Massimo Campigli’s art—celebrated worldwide and featured no fewer than fourteen times at the Venice Biennale—lies in his ability to unite the lessons of the past with images that never lose their relevance. In Campigli, ancient resonances are transformed into distinctly modern images: spare, essential, and set against luminous, sunlit backgrounds. His earthy palette, dense painterly textures reminiscent of fresco, his primitivism, and the essential forms inspired by ancient civilizations—particularly the Etruscan—coexist with a pictorial construction of resolutely modern effect. His artistic pursuit was always that of an archetype, an ancestral form: rigor and symmetry, harmony and balance, but also an inner stillness that radiates from his canvases.

Unique in its kind, his art fuses an archaic sensibility infused with Mediterranean echoes, with outcomes of striking modernity. Found in the permanent collections of the world’s most important museums—from MoMA to the Metropolitan, from the Centre Pompidou to the Pinacoteca di Brera—Campigli’s architectures, well known to Gio Ponti, are often inhabited by abstract female figures, handmaidens of a past that opens the way to the future, becoming totems of a contemporary universe. It is precisely to women that the opening event—bearing a profound social message—will be dedicated. It will take place during Paris Fashion Week on October 2nd, in collaboration between Galleria Maggiore g.a.m., the Sorbonne Nouvelle and the young Italian fashion designer Sara Battaglia.