BAJ chez BAJ
EnricoBAJ
08.10.2024–09.02.2025
curated by
Chiara Gatti and Roberta Cerini Baj
Milan celebrates Enrico Baj (Milan, 31 October 1924 – Vergiate, 16 June 2003), one of the masters of the Italian and international neo-avant-garde, with a major retrospective featured in the autumn exhibitions, devised to retrace all the themes and subjects of his long and multifaceted achievement.
Baj returns to the Sala delle Cariatidi in Palazzo Reale, exactly one hundred years since his birth and twelve years after the exhibition, in the same room, of I Funerali dell’anarchico Pinelli, which for the first time will be integrated into an anthological itinerary and a detailed dialogue with other works by the master.
Promoted by the Comune di Milano-Cultura and produced by Palazzo Reale with Electa, the project is curated by Chiara Gatti and Roberta Cerini Baj. It presents almost 50 works distilled over a period of time, from the early fifties to the start of the new millennium, passing through the phases of the artist’s research and his engagement with different movements over time: from the recovery of Dadaism and Surrealism to the modes of Informal art, from the proximity to the Nordic group of Co.Br.A to the genesis of the Nuclear art movement, which Baj founded in Milan with Sergio Dangelo in 1951. Starting from the Abstract Impressionism of his beginnings, passing through the creation of his larval anthropomorphic figures and the eruption of the liquefied mountains in the magmatic body of I Generali, the show will take in his parody of extraterrestrial invasions to arrive at the Meccano army and the animated world of chests of drawers and pier
glasses.
His characters, who have entered the popular imagination, his Ladies and Generals, Body Snatchers, Mirrors, Furnishings and monsters of the Apocalypse will animate a carousel of creatures resulting from the surrealist and sci-fi universe of an artist who made irony and the grotesque a key to unhinging bourgeois conformism and resist any form of established power.
His famous aesthetics of trinkets and trimmings, tassels and shiny buttons like insignia on the pompous chests of his emblazoned soldiers will be the common thread that stitches together the gigantic themes of Baj’s poetics in sections, freed from a rigid sequence by chronology or genre, continuously cross-referencing art and literature, colours and words, following a sort of script that, even during the staging, will suggest a theatrical
time and space to the viewers.
EnricoBAJ
08.10.2024–09.02.2025
curated by
Chiara Gatti and Roberta Cerini Baj
Milan celebrates Enrico Baj (Milan, 31 October 1924 – Vergiate, 16 June 2003), one of the masters of the Italian and international neo-avant-garde, with a major retrospective featured in the autumn exhibitions, devised to retrace all the themes and subjects of his long and multifaceted achievement.
Baj returns to the Sala delle Cariatidi in Palazzo Reale, exactly one hundred years since his birth and twelve years after the exhibition, in the same room, of I Funerali dell’anarchico Pinelli, which for the first time will be integrated into an anthological itinerary and a detailed dialogue with other works by the master.
Promoted by the Comune di Milano-Cultura and produced by Palazzo Reale with Electa, the project is curated by Chiara Gatti and Roberta Cerini Baj. It presents almost 50 works distilled over a period of time, from the early fifties to the start of the new millennium, passing through the phases of the artist’s research and his engagement with different movements over time: from the recovery of Dadaism and Surrealism to the modes of Informal art, from the proximity to the Nordic group of Co.Br.A to the genesis of the Nuclear art movement, which Baj founded in Milan with Sergio Dangelo in 1951. Starting from the Abstract Impressionism of his beginnings, passing through the creation of his larval anthropomorphic figures and the eruption of the liquefied mountains in the magmatic body of I Generali, the show will take in his parody of extraterrestrial invasions to arrive at the Meccano army and the animated world of chests of drawers and pier
glasses.
His characters, who have entered the popular imagination, his Ladies and Generals, Body Snatchers, Mirrors, Furnishings and monsters of the Apocalypse will animate a carousel of creatures resulting from the surrealist and sci-fi universe of an artist who made irony and the grotesque a key to unhinging bourgeois conformism and resist any form of established power.
His famous aesthetics of trinkets and trimmings, tassels and shiny buttons like insignia on the pompous chests of his emblazoned soldiers will be the common thread that stitches together the gigantic themes of Baj’s poetics in sections, freed from a rigid sequence by chronology or genre, continuously cross-referencing art and literature, colours and words, following a sort of script that, even during the staging, will suggest a theatrical
time and space to the viewers.
