Citywide Exhibition of Modern and Contemporary Drawing
20-28 November 2021
From 20 to 28 November 2021, Collezione Ramo presents the inaugural Milano Drawing Week. Spread across fifteen locations around the city, the event is dedicated to the medium of drawing and explores the ways in which it forms a link between the work of contemporary artists and 20th-century masters.
For nine days this dialogue between modern and contemporary art takes place through works on paper in a series of exhibitions realised in collaboration with a number of Milan’s museums and galleries.
From 20 to 28 November 2021, Collezione Ramo, Italian Drawing of the 20th Century, presents the inaugural Milano Drawing Week, a new annual event dedicated to drawing and works on paper.
Over the course of nine days, it will promote a focused consideration of drawing through a constellation of exhibitions mounted in different venues across the city. For the occasion, Collezione Ramo is making a number of its 20th-century Italian works on paper available to various Milanese galleries and museums. Each institution will host a contemporary artist who will initiate a dialogue between their own work and a piece chosen by them from the collection. The itinerary of this first Drawing Week takes in Castello Sforzesco, Cabinet Studiolo, Castiglioni, Galera San Soda, Francesca Minini, Galleria Fumagalli, Galleria Monica De Cardenas, Galleria Raffaella Cortese, kaufmann repetto, Loom Gallery, M77 Gallery, Mega, OPR Gallery, Schiavo-Zoppelli Gallery and Studio Guenzani.
The event sees works by contemporary artists such as Riccardo Beretta, Marco Pio Mucci, Miss Goffetown, Dennis Oppenheim, Francesco Simeti, Marco Belfiore, Marcello Maloberti, Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, Marco Andrea Magni, Braco Dimitrijevic, Costanza Candeloro, Ettore Tripodi, Andrea Sala and Stefano Arienti juxtaposed with pieces created by great masters of the 20th century including Domenico Gnoli, Filippo de Pisis, Carol Rama, Mario Merz, Enrico Baj, Alighiero Boetti, Giorgio Morandi, Carla Accardi, Luciano Fabro, Giorgio de Chirico, Dadamaino and Ugo La Pietra through a series of shows that aim to shed new light on the expressive medium of drawing.
Comparing and contrasting modern and contemporary imagery expands our understanding of this unique practice – one that enables artists to imagine while they create, capturing their thoughts on paper with immediacy and spontaneity. Another relationship – this time with much older drawing – is explored in the exhibition Tiepolo, Canaletto e i maestri del Settecento veneziano (Tiepolo, Canaletto and the Masters of Eighteenth-century Venice) at the Gabinetto dei Disegni, Castello Sforzesco, which features a delicate ink landscape by Domenico Gnoli on loan from Collezione Ramo that is highly evocative of Tiepolo’s Capricci.
With Milano Drawing Week Collezione Ramo renews its bond with the city, making it fertile ground for new reflections on drawing and bringing together a range of different exhibition programmes, collections and institutions. Irina Zucca Alessandrelli, Curator of Collezione Ramo, says: “Milano Drawing Week represents the first step toward promoting a greater interest in this silent and revolutionary practice, revealing the world to us through the imagery of contemporary artists conscious of their relationship with the past.”
Spanning the entire 20th century, Collezione Ramo gathers together works on paper by key representatives of modern Italian art movements, as well as those by other great talents who pursued their own unique artistic visions. Its aim is to document the evolution of the 20th century’s many different stylistic approaches through works on paper (that is, not only drawings but also watercolours, collages and images created with gouache and pastel). It focuses not only on the acknowledged masterpieces that are emblematic of particular artists, but also on those sketches, jottings and experiments that reveal the evolution of their distinct formal vocabularies.
The goal of the collection is to highlight the importance of 20th-century Italian art and, at the same time, to promote the significance of drawing specifically, considering it to possess an autonomous value equal to that of painting and sculpture.
Key works from Collezione Ramo were first displayed in November 2018 at Milan’s Museo del Novecento with the exhibition Chi ha paura del disegno? (Who’s Afraid of Drawing?); the show subsequently travelled to London’s Estorick Collection in April 2019. A smaller exhibition titled La città moderna a casa Libeskind (The Modern City at Casa Libeskind) was presented at Daniel Libeskind’s CityLife home in April 2018, while Ritorno al collage (Return to Collage) opened in the penthouse of Bosco Verticale in May 2019.
Now, following the major exhibition Silent Revolutions: Italian Drawings from the Twentieth Century at the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston, Collezione Ramo returns home to Milan.