Fondazione Marconi and Gió Marconi are pleased to announce Vocale con accento, the first solo exhibition dedicated entirely to Gianni Colombo’s ceramic work. Curated by Marco Scotini, the exhibition brings more than twenty clay works to the public for the first time, ranging from terracottas to engobed and glazed surfaces. This largely unpublished body of work dates from the early years of the artist’s practice, from 1953 to the founding of Gruppo T. Although the selected works represent only part of Colombo’s ceramic production, Vocale con accento offers the first comprehensive exhibition survey of this formative and significant period in his research. There is always a blind spot in the work of an artist who resists being classified and subsumed into their known and recognised oeuvre. Something that, despite being undeniable, remains overlooked. It is like a secret room that remains hidden and invisible despite being exposed to view. Much like the letter in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”, which remains undetected precisely because it is hidden in plain sight. Such is the case with Gianni Colombo’s ceramic production: a radical beginning that set the course for all his subsequent work, yet has never received adequate critical attention. Although, since 1995, scarcely an exhibition or publication on Gianni Colombo has appeared without including three or four significant examples of his ceramic work, this production seems to have been regarded as a separate chapter, never fully integrated into the broader investigation of his oeuvre. While it is true that terracotta would never again feature in his work, just as polychromy would give way to white monochromes and evocative titles to technical designations, it is equally true that Colombo’s choice of ceramics marked a departure from both painting and sculpture, while also offering Colombo an initial encounter with a material that was plastic, elastic and fluid. It is no coincidence that aspects of ceramic modelling would continue to emerge in the tactility, corporeality and performativity that characterise his subsequent work. Colombo began experimenting with clay in the 1950s, at a time when post-war Italian ceramic culture was reaching its peak. These were the years in which clay emerged as a leading medium of artistic expression, embodying the creative and avant-garde impetus of the immediate post-war period. In 1954, the Incontro Internazionale della Ceramica (International Meeting of Ceramics) took place in Albisola, bringing together a decidedly heterogeneous group of international artists, heirs to Surrealism, in the name of new forms of experimentation with ceramics. They included members of the recently disbanded CoBrA group (Asger Jorn, Karel Appel and Corneille), artists associated with the Nuclear Art Movement (Enrico Baj and Sergio Dangelo), Spatialism (Lucio Fontana), Surrealism (from which Roberto Matta had been expelled in 1948), and the Informel movement (Emilio Scanavino). Shortly afterwards, Joe Colombo, Gianni’s brother, designed the display for the works by these artists, all active in Albisola, presented at the 10th Milan Triennale.