Artists
- Aaron Williamson
- Achille Perilli
- Adam Chodzko
- Adolf Hohenstein
- Adolfo Wildt
- Afro
- Agostino Bonalumi
- Alberto Bevilacqua
- Alberto Burri
- Alberto Di Fabio
- Alberto Magnelli
- Alberto Mastroianni
- Alberto Montacchini
- Alberto Savinio
- Aldo Mazza
- Aldo Schmid
- Aleksandr Semenovich Vedernikov
- Aleksandra Natanovna Latash
- Aleksandra Nikolaevna Yakobson
- Alessandro Bruschetti
- Alex Lowery
- Alexander Archipenko
- Alexandr Rodchenko
- Alfredo Ambrosi
- Alighiero Boetti
- Aligi Sassu
- Alison Turnbull
- Alison Wilding
- Amanda Currie
- Amedeo Modigliani
- Anatoli Lvovich Kaplan
- Andrew Green
- Andrzej Jackowski
- Angelo Morbelli
- Angelo Torchi
- Anton Giulio Bragaglia
- Antonia Campi
- Antonietta Raphaël
- Antonio Boggeri
- Antonio Calderara
- Antonio Sanfilippo
- Anya Gallaccio
- Ardengo Soffici
- Arnaldo Pomodoro
- Arturo Bragaglia
- Arturo Di Stefano
- Arturo Martini
- Arturo Tosi
- Arturo Zavattini
- Atanasio Soldati
- Attilio Maranzano
- Augusto Pedrini
- Aurelio Amendola
- Avgust Vasilievich Lanin
- Ben Nicholson
- Benedetta Marinetti
- Bice Lazzari
- Boris Nikolaevich Ermolaev
- Boyd Webb
- Brighid Lowe
- Bruno Cassinari
- Bruno Munari
- Bruno Tano
- Cagnaccio di San Pietro
- Carla Accardi
- Carlo Carrà
- Carlo Levi
- Carlo Zauli
- Carol Rama
- Catherine Burge
- Ceal Floyer
- Christopher Le Brun
- Claudio Abate
- Corrado Cagli
- Corrado Govoni
- C.R.W. Nevison
- Dadamaino
- Dante Baldelli
- Dario Bernazzoli
- David Bomberg
- David Hockney
- Denis Masi
- Derek Shiel
- Diego Mazzonelli
- Domenico Gnoli
- Dunill and O'Brien
- Eadward Muybridge
- Edward Allington
- Edward McKnight Kauffer
- Edward Wadsworth
- El Lissitzky
- Elisabetta Catalano
- Emanuele Lomiry
- Emanuele Luzzati
- Emanuele Rambaldi
- Emilio Greco
- Emilio Isgrò
- Emilio Scanavino
- Emilio Vedova
- Ennio Morlotti
- Enrica Borghi
- Enrico Castellani
- Enrico Paulucci
- Enrico Paulucci delle Roncole
- Enrico Prampolini
- Eric Bainbridge
- Ernest Brooks
- Ernesto Thayaht
- Ernesto Treccani
- Etienne-Jules Marey
- Ettore Colla
- Ettore de Conciliis
- Ettore Sottsass Jr
- Euan Uglow
- Eugenio Carmi
- Eva Marisaldi
- Fabio Mauri
- Fausto Melotti
- Fausto Pirandello
- Federico Garolla
- Federico Zandomeneghi
- Felice Casorati
- Ferdinando Scianna
- Filippo de Pisis
- Fillia
- Fiona Crisp
- Flavio Costantini
- Flavio de Marco
- Fonderie Fratelli Perani
- Fortunato Depero
- Franca Luccardi
- Francesco Canguillo
- Francesco Menzio
- Franco Garelli
- Franco Grignani
- Franco Rasma
- Franz Marangolo
- Fratelli Alinari
- F.T. Marinetti
- Gabriele Basilico
- Gaetano Previati
- Gary Stevens
- Gastone Medin
- Gavin Turk
- Geoff Uglow
- George Grosz
- Gerardo Dottori
- Gerta Mikhailovna Nemenova
- Giacomo Balla
- Giacomo Manzù
- Gianfranco Baruchello
- Gianfranco Gorgoni
- Gianni Berengo Gardin
- Gianni Pellegrini
- Gianni Piacentino
- Gigi Chessa
- Gilberto Zorio
- Gino Barsotti
- Gino Ghiringhelli
- Gino Severini
- Giò Pomodoro
- Gio Ponti
- Giocondo (Goghy) Faggioni
- Giorgio Avigdor
- Giorgio Casali
- Giorgio Colombo
- Giorgio de Chirico
- Giorgio Host Ivessich
- Giorgio Morandi
- Giovanni Anselmo
- Giovanni Korompay
- Giovanni Segantini
- Giuditta Scalini
- Giulio Gigli
- Giulio Paolini
- Giuseppe Capogrossi
- Giuseppe Capponi
- Giuseppe Cavalli
- Giuseppe Migneco
- Giuseppe Pelliza da Volpedo
- Giuseppe Penone
- Giuseppe Preziosi
- Giuseppe Raverta
- Giuseppe Santomaso
- Giuseppe Spagnulo
- Giuseppe Uncini
- Giuseppe Vivani
- Giuseppe Wenter Marini
- Giuseppe Zigaina
- Gjon Mili
- Glenys Johnson
- Goffredo Alessandrini
- Graham Ellard
- Grazia Varisco
- Grigori Aleksandrovich Izrailevich
- Guido Fiorini
- Guilio Turcato
- Gustav Klucis
- Hannah Hoch
- Harold Edgerton
- Hayley Newman
- Helen Saunders
- Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
- Henryk Berlewi
- Herbert Bayer
- Ida Barbarigo
- Iliich Minei Kuks
- Interventions
- Irina Nikolaevna Maslennikova
- Ivo Pannaggi
- Jacob Epstein
- Jaki Irvine
- Jannis Kounellis
- Jean Arp
- Jefford Horrigan
- Jo Stockham
- Johannes Bader
- John Heartfield
- John Kindness
- John Riddy
- Johnnie Shand Kydd
- Jonathan Shaw
- Jordan Baseman
- Kazimir Malevich
- Keith Roberts
- Kit Wise
- Kurt Schwitters and Theo van Doesburg
- Ladislav Sutnar
- Lala Meredith-Vula
- Laslo Moholy-Nagy
- Lawrence Atkinson
- Leo Lionni
- Leoncillo Leonardi
- Leonetto Cappiello
- Lino Mannocci
- Lisetta Carmi
- Louise Camrass
- Luca Buvoli
- Lucio Fontana
- Lucy Skaer
- Luigi Broggini
- Luigi Ghirri
- Luigi Martinati
- Luigi Pericle
- Luigi Russolo
- Luigi Senesi
- Luigi Veronesi
- Luigi Vietti
- Luke Elwes
- Lyubov Popova
- Maga
- Manlio Rho
- Marcello Dudovich
- Marcello Geppetti
- Marcello Nizzoli
- Marcello Piacentini
- Marco Biassoni
- Maria Lai
- Marino Marini
- Mario Cresci
- Mario Dondero
- Mario Gabinio
- Mario Giacomelli
- Mario Mafai
- Mario Merz
- Mario Radice
- Mario Schifano
- Mario Sironi
- Mario Tozzi
- Marion Coutts
- Mark Wallinger
- Massimo Campigli
- Mauro Cappelletti
- Mauro Reggiani
- Medardo Rosso
- Merlin James
- Michael Craig-Martin
- Michael Kruger
- Michael Rachlis
- Michelangelo Pistoletto
- Mike Marshall
- Mikhail Matiushin
- Mimmo Jodice
- Mimmo Paladino
- Mimmo Rotella
- Mino Delle Site
- Mino Maccari
- Mino Rosso
- Mirella Bentivoglio
- Mona Hatoum
- Nanda Lanfranco
- Niamh O'Malley
- Nico Vascellari
- Nicola Galante
- Nicolay Diulgheroff
- Nikolaevich Mikhail Skulyari
- Nino Migliori
- Nino Nanni
- Nino Vitali
- Olga Rozanova
- Olivier Debré
- Oskar Schlemmer
- Osvaldo Licini
- Ottavio Missoni
- Ottone Rosai
- P Ferro
- Pablo Echaurren
- Paolo Mussat Sartor
- Paolo Pellion
- Paolo Scheggi
- Pasquarosa
- Pat Naldi
- Patrick Caulfield
- Paul Coldwell
- Paul Winstanley
- peter de francia
- Piergiorgio Branzi
- Piero Dorazio
- Piero Manzoni
- Piero Pizzi Cannella
- Piet Zwart
- Pietro Consagra
- Pietro Donzelli
- Pietro Melandri
- Pino Pascali
- Primo Conti
- Primo Sinopico
- Rachel Whiteread
- Renato Birolli
- Renato di Bosso
- Renato Guttuso
- Richard Billingham
- Richard Long
- Roberto Crippa
- Roberto Marcello Baldessari
- Romeo Bevilacqua
- Rosita Missoni
- Salvatore Meli
- Salvo
- Sandro Becchetti
- Scipione
- Sergei Maksimillianovich Steinberg
- Sergio Strizzi
- Shauna McMullan
- Sigrid Holmwood
- Sol LeWitt
- Sophie Ko
- Sophy Rickett
- special displays
- Stephen Johnstone
- Stephen Nelson
- Stewart
- Susan Trangmar
- Sydney Carline
- Tancredi
- Tano Festa
- Tato
- Thayaht
- Thomas Eakins
- Thomas Lamb
- Thomas Newbolt
- Tim Stoner
- Timothy Hyman
- Toby Glanville
- Tomaso Binga
- Tomaso Buzzi
- Tono Zancanaro
- Tony Bevan
- Tony Cragg
- Tullio Crali
- Ugo Mochi
- Ugo Mulas
- Ugo Nespolo
- Uliano Lucas
- Umberto Boccioni
- Umberto Di Lazzaro
- Umberto Mastroianni
- Valentin Yakovlevich Brodsky
- Varvara Stepanova
- Vera Fedorovna Matyukh
- Verossi
- Victor Willing
- Vincenzo Agnetti
- Virgilio Retrosi
- Vittorio Sella
- Vittorio Zecchin
- Willi Baumeister
- William Joseph Brunell
- William Roberts
- William Scott
- Wladimiro Tulli
- Wladyslaw Strzeminski
- Wyndham Lewis
- Yuri Alekseevich Vasnetsov
- Zoran Music
15 January 2025 - 11 May 2025
The Estorick Collection starts 2025 by exploring the revolutionary world of experimental poetry with two intersecting displays, Futurism and the Origins of Experimental Poetry and Dom Sylvester Houédard and Concrete Poetry in Post-war Britain.
Read more...18 September 2024 - 22 December 2024
Antonio Calderara (1903-1978) is renowned for his delicate and exquisitely balanced abstract imagery which, in its restraint and subtlety, exhibits affinities with the work of Giorgio Morandi.
Read more...15 May 2024 - 8 September 2024
Sergio Strizzi (1931–2004) is considered one of cinematic still photography’s greatest talents. He worked with Italy’s top film directors, including Antonioni and De Sica, as well as internationally-renowned figures such as John Huston and Peter Greenaway, and worked as a photographer on the sets of several James Bond films.
Read more...12 January 2024 - 28 April 2024
Pasquarosa Marcelli (1896 - 1973), known simply as 'Pasquarosa', was one of the first Italian artists to have a solo exhibition in London, during the 1920s. A century later, her work returns to the capital in a new show featuring some 50 paintings and drawings on loan from Rome’s Archivio Nino e Pasquarosa Bertoletti and other private collections.
Read more...20 September 2023 - 17 December 2023
The first museum show in the UK of ground-breaking photographer Lisetta Carmi (1924 – 2022), whose imagery is currently receiving renewed attention.
Read more...14 June 2023 - 10 September 2023
The first exhibition dedicated to the work of Osvaldo Licini (1894-1958) in the UK. A key figure of 20th-century Italian art, Licini participated in the Futurist movement before establishing himself as a figurative painter of portraits, landscapes and still lifes.
Read more...6 January 2023 - 28 May 2023
In January 2023, to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the Estorick Collection opening to the public in 1998, we will present an exhibition of works by one of the most popular artists in our permanent collection, Giorgio Morandi.
Read more...14 September 2022 - 18 December 2022
Luigi Pericle (1916-2001), was a fascinating and singular artist whose work was greatly admired by Herbert Read and Ben Nicholson.
Read more...4 May 2022 - 4 September 2022
An exploration of the relationship between Ukrainian-born American artist Alexander Archipenko (1887-1964) and the masters of Italian modern art.
Read more...14 January 2022 - 24 April 2022
Exploring the aesthetics of Art Informel, minimalism and hard-edged abstraction, Bice Lazzari's paintings made a significant contribution to twentieth-century Italian art, yet have remained largely unknown outside her native country.
Read more...6 October 2021 - 19 December 2021
In autumn 2021, the Estorick’s entire collection of modern Italian art was on show throughout the museum’s six galleries in a new exhibition, Estorick Collection Uncut.
Read more...30 June 2021 - 26 September 2021
In the summer of 2021, the Estorick Collection presented an exhibition by French post-war painter Olivier Debré (1920-1999). The show was selected by Michael Estorick, Chair of the Estorick Trustees, and son of Eric and Salome Estorick, whose renowned collection of Modern Italian Art is housed in the museum. This was the first major show of the artist's work in the UK in 44 years, and brought together some 30 oils and works on paper, including 16 of Debré’s large-scale paintings.
Read more...30 September 2020 - 20 June 2021
Founded in Genoa in 1926, MITA was an Italian firm that specialized in rugs, tapestries and other textiles, and earned its reputation by collaborating with some of Italy's most talented artists. This exhibition revealed the company's characteristically Italian approach to design.
Read more...15 January 2020 - 13 September 2020
For Tullio Crali (1910-2000) Futurism was not simply a style of painting, but an attitude to life itself. This exhilarating exhibition explored every phase of Crali’s remarkably coherent career, featuring a large number of rarely seen works from the 1920s to the 1980s.
Read more...25 September 2019 - 22 December 2019
The destruction, in 1927, of a number of plaster sculptures by Futurist artist Umberto Boccioni represented a great loss for avant-garde art. Now, using a wealth of photographic source material and ground-breaking 3D printing techniques, artists Matt Smith and Anders Råden recreated three of the artist’s iconic striding figures. This exciting and innovative display enabled visitors to ‘see’ these lost masterpieces for the first time.
Read more...3 July 2019 - 15 September 2019
Paolo Scheggi (1940-1971) belonged to the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s and was one of the protagonists of Spatialism. This exhibition spanned the artist’s entire career, including his most famous works formed of overlapping layers of canvas pierced by biomorphic or geometric openings.
Read more...17 April 2019 - 23 June 2019
Milan’s Ramo Collection comprises nearly 600 works on paper by artists belonging to some of the most important movements and tendencies in twentieth-century Italian art. This exhibition – the first to present a selection of drawings from the Collection outside Italy – explored the discipline as more than just a ‘preparatory’ activity, considering it as an art form in its own right.
Read more...16 January 2019 - 7 April 2019
Informed by the languages of music and mathematics, Melotti’s harmonious and delicately-poised work is revered in Italy, yet surprisingly little-known in the UK.
Read more...26 September 2018 - 23 December 2018
Since the early 1990s, Giuseppe Iannaccone has been amassing one of the most outstanding private collections of Italian art of the inter-war years. Presenting a large number of iconic works, this exhibition explored a crucial phase of Italian art history little-known outside its native country.
Read more...4 July 2018 - 16 September 2018
This exhibition celebrated Campari’s rich heritage in creativity and design, showcasing the ground-breaking advertising and packaging designs responsible for establishing and maintaining unrivalled global recognition for the brand.
Read more...18 April 2018 - 24 June 2018
This exhibition explored a little known period of Italian cinematic history, highlighting the strong Modernist influence apparent in the set designs created for a number of romantic comedies during the inter-war years.
Read more...24 January 2018 - 8 April 2018
The Estorick opened its 20th anniversary year with a major exhibition of works from one of the world’s most important collections of modern Italian art, housed at Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera.
Read more...20 September 2017 - 17 December 2017
The term ‘Arte Povera’ was first used in September 1967 by the critic Germano Celant to describe the work of a number of artists who engaged with unconventional, and often humble, materials.
Read more...5 July 2017 - 10 September 2017
Best known for his swirling ‘Woolmark’ logo, Franco Grignani (1908-1999) was an extraordinary graphic designer and artist whose dazzling works anticipated many of the key ideas and visual characteristics of Op Art by several years.
Read more...5 April 2017 - 25 June 2017
Organised in collaboration with the Biagiotti Cigna Collection, this major exhibition presented a career-spanning retrospective of one of Italian Futurism's most important and consistently inventive artists. Encompassing his early Divisionist imagery, iconic Futurist paintings and examples of his distinctive work in the sphere of the applied arts, it offered a comprehensive survey of Balla's multifaceted activity between the years 1895 and 1958, including many works rarely seen outside Italy.
Read more...13 January 2017 - 19 March 2017
Following an extensive refurbishment of the museum, the Estorick Collection reopened with a major exhibition of rarely seen works documenting the role of British forces in Italy during the First World War. Comprising the imagery of official war artists and photographers, it highlighted a forgotten aspect of Britain’s involvement in the conflict.
Read more...13 April 2016 - 31 July 2016
In the autumn of 1976, a group of painters from Italy’s northern Trentino region published their ‘Manifesto of Objective Abstraction’. Reacting against what they considered to be the superficiality of contemporary culture, Mauro Cappelletti, Diego Mazzonelli, Gianni Pellegrini, Aldo Schmid, Luigi Senesi and Giuseppe Wenter Marini called for a renewed attention to the painterly process and its fundamentally abstract concerns.
Read more...15 January 2016 - 3 April 2016
A giant of twentieth-century sculpture, Giacomo Manzù (1908-1991) is best known for delicate and moving work focusing predominantly on portraiture and religious imagery. As sensitive to line as to form, his drawings exhibit the same restrained power and sinuous qualities familiar from his more celebrated bas-reliefs and three-dimensional work.
Read more...23 September 2015 - 20 December 2015
This fascinating exhibition presented the findings of a group of specialist art historians, restorers and scientists who examined key works from the Estorick’s permanent collection. Using the most up-to-date methods employed in the analysis of artworks, they shed new light on the different techniques used by a number of painters, and in some cases even revealed the presence of previously unknown images beneath, or on the back of, the Collection’s masterpieces.
Read more...8 July 2015 - 6 September 2015
Fausto Pirandello was one of the most important and influential painters working in Italy between the 1930s and the 1950s. The son of dramatist Luigi Pirandello, his work expressed a vision of reality that was raw, carnal and unflinchingly objective.
Read more...15 April 2015 - 28 June 2015
One of the acknowledged superstars of twentieth-century art, Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) is also the best known and most loved of all modern Italian painters. Working at the epicentre of avant-garde experimentation in Paris between 1906 and 1920, he developed an artistic vision that was entirely his own. This exhibition was the first to be devoted to the artist at the Estorick Collection, and focused on his works on paper, showing the spiritual and stylistic development of his portrayal of the human face and form.
Read more...14 January 2015 - 4 April 2015
A selection of drawings by the British artist Peter de Francia made in Italy in the years 1947 to 1953. It is dedicated to the friendship between the two artists who met in post-war Italy.
Read more...14 January 2015 - 4 April 2015
Renato Guttuso (1911-1987) is one of Italy’s most widely respected modern painters. Towards the end of the 1930s his powerful brand of expressionist realism vividly conveyed the angst of a generation which wanted its art to reflect and engage with the urgency of contemporary life. Rejecting both the formalism of abstract painting and the naturalism advocated by those on the far right of Fascism’s cultural establishment, Guttuso played a key role in forging a style that would go on to dominate Italian art during the immediate post-war years.
Read more...24 September 2014 - 20 December 2014
This stimulating exhibition, spanning two millennia, juxtaposed antiquities from the important archaeological site of Ostia Antica, near Rome, with the work of two modern Italian artists: Umberto Mastroianni (1910-1998) and Ettore de Conciliis (b. 1941).
Read more...9 July 2014 - 7 September 2014
Gerardo Dottori (1884-1977) was one of the pivotal figures of Italian Futurism during the inter-war years. His expansive and intensely poetic visions of the Umbrian landscape, viewed from above, were among the earliest and most striking examples of ‘aeropainting’ – the dominant trend within Futurist art throughout the 1930s, exploring the dynamic perspectives offered by flight.
Read more...30 April 2014 - 29 June 2014
The 1950s and ’60s represent a golden era in Italian film, when directors Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Federico Fellini produced some of their most famous movies. John Wayne, Charlton Heston, Lauren Bacall and Liz Taylor, among other Hollywood stars, also frequented the capital as American filmmakers were lured to Rome by the comparative low cost of its Cinecittà studios, where such epic productions as Ben-Hur (1959) and Cleopatra (1963) were shot. In the evenings the focus of Rome’s movie culture – as well as the lenses of its paparazzi – shifted to the bars and restaurants lining the city’s exclusive Via Veneto, the presence of celebrities like Alain Delon, Kirk Douglas and Audrey Hepburn transforming Rome’s streets into ‘an open-air film set’.
Read more...15 January 2014 - 19 April 2014
The visionary work of Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) had an enormous impact on the course of twentieth-century art. His unsettling ‘Metaphysical’ imagery – with its illogical perspectives, looming mannequins and bizarre juxtapositions of objects – anticipated Surrealism’s fascination with the irrational and the workings of the subconscious by many years. Even before the First World War, de Chirico had declared: ‘To be really immortal a work of art must go beyond the limits of the human: good sense and logic will be missing from it. In this way it will come close to the dream state, and also to the mentality of children.’
Read more...25 September 2013 - 22 December 2013
Organised to mark the centenary of Emilio Greco’s birth, this exhibition was the first show at the Estorick Collection to be devoted to sculpture.
Read more...22 May 2013 - 8 September 2013
For over thirty years, Giorgio Casali (1913-1995) photographed the work of the greatest post-war Italian architects and designers for Gio Ponti’s famous magazine, the style bible Domus.
Read more...16 January 2013 - 28 April 2013
The Estorick Collection inaugurated its fifteenth-anniversary year with an exhibition of some 80 etchings and watercolours by the master of poetic understatement, Giorgio Morandi.
Read more...19 September 2012 - 23 December 2012
Bruno Munari was one of the most complex, creative and multi-faceted figures of twentieth-century Italian art. This exhibition traced his career from its early years up to the post-war period, when he became a point of reference for a new generation of artists and designers.
Read more...27 June 2012 - 9 September 2012
In Astratto explored fifty years of innovation in Italian abstraction, and presented a comprehensive survey of the myriad approaches to the subject that emerged during the key period from 1930 to 1980.
Read more...18 April 2012 - 17 June 2012
One of the key figures of twentieth-century Italian photography, Giuseppe Cavalli (1904-1961) is surprisingly little known outside his native country. Reacting against the rhetorical and overblown imagery of the Fascist era, Cavalli’s work is imbued with the intimate poetry of daily life. Best known for his subtle studies of reclining nudes and everyday objects such as bottles, glasses and candlesticks, Cavalli in fact steadfastly subscribed to the principle that ‘the subject has no importance at all’ in the work of art – and indeed such elements were simply vehicles for his true subject: light. This exhibition of delicate and timeless images from the Prelz Oltramonti Collection spanned the artist’s brief career, which ended prematurely with his death at the age of only fifty-seven.
Read more...13 January 2012 - 7 April 2012
Alberto Burri (1915-1995) revolutionised the artistic vocabulary of the post-war art world. During the 1950s his celebration of humble materials such as sacking and tar created a new aesthetic, rich in expressive power, that was later to prove decisive for artists associated with the Arte Povera movement. Despite his importance, this exhibition was the first major retrospective of the artist’s work to be held in the United Kingdom. It offered a comprehensive overview of Burri's achievement through works spanning four decades: from rare, figurative pieces of the late 1940s to the ground-breaking abstract works for which he is best known.
Read more...14 September 2011 - 18 December 2011
Edward McKnight Kauffer produced some of the most iconic and influential commercial imagery of the early twentieth century. A remarkably versatile artist, his work drew inspiration from a wide variety of styles ranging from Japanese art to Fauvism, Vorticism and Constructivism, and encompassed painting, applied art, interior design and scenography. Yet it remains his celebrated posters created for clients such as London Underground and Shell during the inter-war years for which he remains most famous. Kauffer's pioneering work in the field of graphic design ranks alongside the achievements of fellow avant-garde figures such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, all of whom – like Kauffer – had roots in the United States yet established their careers in London.
Read more...22 June 2011 - 4 September 2011
United Artists of Italy showed twentieth-century Italian art in a new light, presenting the artists through the eyes of some of Italy's most celebrated photographers. The exhibition revealed a visual profile of contemporary art and artists not through their artworks but through faces, poses and expressions. Some 85 photographs were carefully selected from a collection of 250 portraits put together over a period of many years by Brescia-based contemporary art dealer Massimo Minini.
Read more...13 April 2011 - 12 June 2011
Double Portrait told the unusual love story of a beautiful Venetian painter and a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp. The Estorick Collection exhibition about husband and wife artists Zoran Music and Ida Barbarigo had a particular resonance because of their relationship with Eric and Salome Estorick.
Read more...12 January 2011 - 3 April 2011
Containing works by artists including Filippo de Pisis, Fortunato Depero and Giorgio de Chirico, the collection of Alberto Della Ragione provides an extraordinarily comprehensive overview of Italian Modernism.
Read more...22 September 2010 - 19 December 2010
Whilst several major exhibitions have explored the propaganda imagery of Fascist Italy, art produced by those opposed to Mussolini and his regime has received surprisingly little attention. Against Mussolini brought together works produced in Italy and abroad throughout the Fascist era (1922- 43), but focused particularly on the period immediately after the dictator's fall from power following Italy's disastrous Second World War campaign. These last tragic years saw the re-emergence of Mussolini as the puppet leader of a Fascist administration in the north of the country and the onset of a bitter civil war, as the Resistance fought alongside the Allies to restore democracy and liberate Italy from tyranny.
Read more...1 July 2010 - 12 September 2010
Johnnie Shand Kydd is an acclaimed documentary photographer perhaps best known for his portraits of artist friends such as Tracy Emin and Damien Hirst. In 2000 he embarked on a longterm project to capture the dramatic and chaotic world of Naples. Having never visited the city before, he soon developed a relationship with it that he described as 'akin to a drug habit', returning again and again over the next eight years.
Read more...28 April 2010 - 20 June 2010
Another Country brought together ten highly respected contemporary painters: Tony Bevan, Arturo Di Stefano, Luke Elwes, Timothy Hyman, Andrzej Jackowski, Merlin James, Glenys Johnson, Alex Lowery, Lino Mannocci and Thomas Newbolt.
Read more...13 January 2010 - 18 April 2010
Although the problem of depicting movement in painting and sculpture had concerned artists for many centuries, the birth of the Futurist movement in 1909 signalled a renewed interest in the subject. Taking as its starting point the Estorick's own collection of Futurist masterpieces, On the Move drew on a wide range of material in many different media to provide an in-depth examination of this complex and fascinating theme.
Read more...30 September 2009 - 20 December 2009
Terra Incognita: Italy's Ceramic Revival presented an extraordinary selection of fifty key works drawn from the Bernd and Eva Hockemeyer Collection of twentieth-century Italian ceramic art.
Read more...1 July 2009 - 20 September 2009
Missoni is one of the leading and most distinctive fashion houses in the world. The Missoni style has evolved out of a long-standing collaboration between the husband and wife team of Ottavio and Rosita Missoni. In the late 1940s, Ottavio Missoni established a workshop producing jersey tracksuits that were sported by the Italian Athletic Team at the 1948 London Olympics, where Ottavio himself qualified for the final of the 400m hurdle race.
Read more...29 April 2009 - 21 June 2009
An exhibition of period photographs from the British Architectural Library Photographs Collection. Ever since its inception, photography has profoundly influenced the practice and study of architecture. This was especially true with the advent of Modernism which, during the 1920s, brought architecture and photography into closer alliance than ever before.
Read more...14 January 2009 - 19 April 2009
20 February 2009 marked the centenary of the publication of F.T. Marinetti's Futurist manifesto in the popular Paris newspaper Le Figaro. Although Marinetti himself was a poet, his ideas swiftly attracted artists from other disciplines.
Read more...24 September 2008 - 21 December 2008
The manipulation of photographic imagery is as old as photography itself, but the modernist conception of photomontage was a radical extension of techniques and creative attitudes that first emerged in Cubist, Futurist and Dadaist collage, in which cut-out photographs and fragments of newsprint from illustrated journals were pasted into drawings and paintings.
Read more...25 June 2008 - 14 September 2008
Vittorio Sella was born in 1859 in Biella, about 50 miles north-east of Turin in the foothills of the Italian Alps, not far from the peaks of Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa. His father had written the first Italian language treatise on photography in 1856 and his uncle Quintino Sella, a distinguished statesman and keen Alpinist, founded the Italian Alpine Club in 1863.
Read more...16 April 2008 - 15 June 2008
Over a period of sixty years following the Second World War, Vito Merlini (1923-2007) amassed an extraordinary collection of prints whilst working as a doctor in his Tuscan home town of Peccioli. Following his first acquisition – a lithograph by Ardengo Soffici – the collection grew until by the turn of the century it numbered around 1,000 works, comprising prints by both Italian and international artists from de Chirico to Mirò, Guttuso to Sutherland. Towards the end of his life, 279 works from the collection were presented by Merlini to Peccioli, and it is from this donation that the exhibition was drawn.
Read more...16 January 2008 - 6 April 2008
Comprising over 120 works by many of the most prominent Italian artists of the Modernist era, the Estorick Collection opened to the public in January 1998. Described by Sir Nicholas Serota as 'one of the finest collections of early 20th century Italian art anywhere in the world', it was formed in the late 1940s and early 1950s by Eric Estorick (1913-93), an American art-dealer, writer and political scientist, and is the only collection in the United Kingdom dedicated to this turbulent and fascinating period of Italian art.
Read more...26 September 2007 - 23 December 2007
When Futurism was founded in 1909, its hostility towards the institution of the Catholic Church was pronounced, and accompanied by a rejection of Christian concepts of morality. Despite this, the publication of a 'Manifesto of Futurist Sacred Art' in 1931 inspired a flowering of religious painting that constitutes perhaps one of the most unexpected episodes in the history of the movement.
Read more...27 June 2007 - 9 September 2007
Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. His enduring experiments with space are landmarks in the history of abstract art and led many artists, including Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni, to consider him to be the father of contemporary art. His work can be seen as prefiguring much of the conceptual art being created today.
Read more...28 March 2007 - 17 June 2007
After founding Futurism in 1909, F.T. Marinetti’s ambition was to establish an international movement that would develop his own group’s activities, achievements and interests. Futurist ideas quickly became familiar to Russian artists through translations of manifestos and newspaper articles, yet Marinetti’s visit to the country in 1914 provoked mixed responses. While many artists admired his revolutionary zeal others resented what they perceived to be Marinetti’s cultural imperialism.
Read more...10 January 2007 - 19 March 2007
This exhibition displayed thirty-six large scale original designs by little-known artists from the archives of the Imperial War Museum, London. The coloured drawings were translated into black and white postcards for mass reproduction throughout Italy. Postcards first appeared in Austria from 1869 and became increasingly popular across Europe and America, reaching a ‘golden age’ in the first decade of the 20th century.
Read more...4 October 2006 - 17 December 2006
This exhibition was the first major retrospective to be devoted to that most enigmatic of Futurists, Luigi Russolo (1885-1947). A signatory of the ‘Manifesto of the Futurist Painters’ in 1910, Russolo is perhaps best known as a pioneering musician, his theory of the ‘art of noises’ a landmark in the history of avant-garde music. By contrast, Russolo’s pictorial work remains little-known, particularly that of his post-Futurist phase.
Read more...28 June 2006 - 24 September 2006
Abstraction first emerged in Italian art around 1910, when painters belonging to the Futurist school began developing their studies of light and motion in bold new directions, depicting ‘the essential force lines of speed’ as brightly-coloured arcs and thrusting, jagged forms.
Read more...5 April 2006 - 18 June 2006
Giorgio Morandi is one of the most famous and popular Italian painters of the twentieth century, best known for his contemplative still life paintings of familiar objects such as bottles, vases, jugs and boxes, painted in subtle combinations of colour and a narrow range of tones. Yet his work also contains radical ideas about the nature of picture-making and artistic practice that have made it consistently relevant to subsequent generations of artists.
Read more...18 January 2006 - 26 March 2006
This exhibition, supported by the Henry Moore Foundation, showed the work of thirty-five selected contemporary British artists who have been awarded scholarships at the British School at Rome over the past decade.
Read more...14 September 2005 - 18 December 2005
Marcello Levi is one of the leading collectors of contemporary art in Italy. He began collecting works by members of the Futurist movement, such as Giacomo Balla and Gerardo Dottori, before becoming one of the earliest supporters of Arte Povera in the late 1960s. His friendship with the artists enabled him to acquire a remarkable series of works that have rarely been shown in public.
Read more...15 June 2005 - 4 September 2005
This exhibition offered a rare opportunity to admire and explore an outstanding private archive of photographs by the most important modern and contemporary Italian masters, selected from the Prelz Oltramonti Collection.
Read more...9 March 2005 - 5 June 2005
The inter-war period was a time of extraordinary change in Europe and a moment of radical inventiveness in the history of art and culture. The advance of the machine age brought with it mass production and a new sense of internationalism. This ‘heroic’ period of modernity found a particularly forceful expression in graphic design and photomontage, with new techniques enabling a fusion of typography, painting and photography for artistic, commercial and political ends.
Read more...6 January 2005 - 20 February 2005
Dominating Futurist art throughout the 1930s, aeropainting embodied the movement’s fascination with technology, speed and the machine, striving to capture the visual and metaphysical sensations of flight in dramatic and often intensely poetic imagery. This exhibition offered visitors an exhilarating birds-eye view of the world through the eyes of the Futurist artists.
Read more...30 September 2004 - 19 December 2004
In the earliest years of the twentieth century the still life genre underwent something of a renaissance. As artists became increasingly concerned with purely formal, pictorial values, it came to be considered a perfect vehicle for experimentation with new aesthetics, free from any complicating narrative dimensions.
Read more...23 June 2004 - 19 September 2004
The exhibition celebrated 150 years of Fratelli Alinari, the renowned photographic studio that documented the changing cultural and social landscape of Italy from the mid-nineteenth century.
Read more...28 April 2004 - 13 June 2004
This highly unusual venture was the result of an encounter between Mimmo Paladino and Sol LeWitt in Rome in 2002. Both artists each began twelve works in gouache. These half-completed paintings were then exchanged and finished by the other artist.
Read more...4 February 2004 - 18 April 2004
Vorticism is one of the most important and distinctive avant-garde art movements of the early twentieth century, and was Britain’s most significant contribution to the development of modernism.
Read more...17 September 2003 - 25 January 2004
Italy has produced some of cinema’s most striking moments as well as a rich cavalcade of writers, producers, directors and stars whose work has been acclaimed as classics of their kind, not only within Italy but also of internationally. This exhibition of posters offered an insight into the most important and innovative periods of Italian cinema, and paid homage to the artists and designers who created them.
Read more...4 June 2003 - 7 September 2003
Inspired by the achievements of the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists, the school of painting known as Divisionism emerged in Italy around the end of the nineteenth century. Like their French counterparts, these artists were fascinated with capturing effects of light, and this pioneering exhibition explored their attempts to evoke that most elusive of subjects.
Read more...22 January 2003 - 18 April 2003
In association with the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Giorgio di Chirico (1888-1978) was one of the most innovative and controversial artists of the twentieth century. His enigmatic paintings, with their dream-like imagery of deserted city squares filled with mysterious shadows, stopped clocks and sleeping statues, had a profound influence on modern art.
Read more...2 October 2002 - 22 December 2002
This major exhibition provided an evocative analysis of the events and tastes of the Fascist era through fine examples of furniture, glassware, ceramics, painting, sculpture and graphic design. Many of the leading artistic figures of the day were represented, including Gio Ponti, Duilio Cambellotti, Mario Sironi, Galileo Chini, Marcello Piacentini and Gerardo Dottori.
Read more...26 June 2002 - 15 September 2002
Pasta comes in hundreds of shapes and sizes and is covered by thousands of sauces. It is fast food but good food, as unambiguous as a symbol of Italy as a Vespa or Fellini. It is also the most universal dish on the planet.
Read more...3 May 2002 - 9 June 2002
This exhibition provided an insight into a crucial phase in the artistic development of one of Italy’s most stimulating artists, showing his unpublished works on paper.
Read more...6 February 2002 - 28 April 2002
This exhibition chronicled the golden age of Italian aviation through forty-four posters of immense artistic and historical interest, on loan to the Estorick Collection from the Massimo and Sonia Cirulli Archive, New York. One of the earliest and most effective means of mass communication, the poster was the perfect medium through which to stimulate public interest in the aeronautical endeavours and achievements of the day.
Read more...10 October 2001 - 20 January 2002
Carlo Carrà (1881-1966) is one of the most important Italian artists and writers on art of the first half of the twentieth century. Carrà was one of the founding painters and propagandists of Italian Futurism in 1910, and his early Futurist work, Leaving the Theatre (1910-11) is in our permanent collection. He also painted in the style of the Metaphysical School along with Giorgio de Chirico and Giorgio Morandi between 1915 and 1919. This exhibition concentrates on Carrà’s drawing, a daily activity and aide-memoire for the artist, which resulted in thousands of works during his lifetime.
Read more...16 May 2001 - 26 August 2001
This exhibition comprised twelve oil paintings from four private collections in Florence, together with ten drawings and eighteen etchings from the Estorick Collection, ranging in date from 1912 to 1959. The core of the exhibition comprised nine paintings from the collection of Roberto Longhi (1890-1970), the most important Italian art historian and critic of his time, as well as a life-long friend of the artist and collector of his work. Other works included a 1935 landscape given by Longhi to his doctor, Professor Noferi, a 1943 landscape that was a wedding present Longhi gave to the critic Piero Bigongiari, and a 1936 landscape from the Alberto Della Ragione collection.
Read more...24 January 2001 - 22 April 2001
At the turn of the twentieth century, parascientific experiments, spiritualist photography, multi-portraits, montage effects and the chronophotographs of Etienne-Jules Marey provided a rich background against which a Futurist photo-aesthetic gradually formed.
Read more...4 October 2000 - 22 December 2000
Fortunato Depero (1892-1960) was born in the mountainous region of Trentino, North Italy, attending the Scuola Reale Elisabettina, an applied arts institute. He was a painter, a sculptor, decorative artist, poet and writer as well as an interior, stage, costume and graphic designer. This exhibition featured 108 of his works, showing the range of media in which the artist excelled.
Read more...2 June 2000 - 17 September 2000
The life and work of Zoran Music spans most of the twentieth century, and bears witness to some of its most terrible events. This exhibition was the first of Music’s work in Britain for over half a century, and brought together most phases of his career, from the early Dalmation landscapes, Dachau works, and Venetian scenes to the remarkable late self-portraits.
Read more...15 March 2000 - 21 May 2000
This exhibition was organised to celebrate the centenary of Primo Conti's birth. Tracing the developments in his own style, it looked at his place within the Futurist constellation, and how the Futurist Florentine group influenced him between 1913 and 1919, before he moved away from Futurism to explore other inspirations and influences.
Read more...2 February 2000 - 5 March 2000
Derek Shiel, an Irish artist and writer, was the Collection’s first artist-in-residence. He worked closely with musicians, music educators, a storyteller, puppets and an animateur on a series of interactive workshop sessions around his exhibition of sound sculptures.
Read more...6 October 1999 - 9 January 2000
Gino Severini (1883-1966) is one of the major figures in twentieth century Italian art. His exhibition at London’s Marlborough Gallery in 1913 was a success de scandale, provoking critical acclaim and bewilderment in the popular press. It was not until 1969, when Eric Estorick organised a retrospective of 72 works at the Grosvenor Gallery, that Severini’s work was seen again in Britain.
Read more...26 May 1999 - 19 September 1999
This exhibition represented a rare opportunity to see nineteen paintings by Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), spanning his career from 1914, his early Futurist phase, up to 1957, together with fourteen works by his contemporaries. They are selected from the collection of Augusto and Francesca Giovanardi, who shared a passion for mid-century Italian painting, particularly still lifes and landscapes.
Read more...6 January 1999 - 11 April 1999
This exhibition explored the editorial production of the Futurist movement (1909-1944) through manifestos, magazines, posters, parole-in-liberta and books. The Futurists proclaimed a desire to destroy all libraries in 1909 when, ironically, their literary production would have substantially increased the holdings of any such establishment. They also orchestrated a fundamental renovation of the book in graphic form, just as it faced a treat from the introduction of radio and cinema.
Read more...9 September 1998 - 13 December 1998
This exhibition of 23 Futurist works on loan from the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, linked the first and second waves of Futurism through the works of Giacomo Balla (1871-1958). Balla was already well established as an artist and teacher before coming under the influence of Futurism in 1910. His extraordinary versatility and creativity had a profound influence on his contemporaries and the eight canvases on show were from his most vibrant Futurist period.
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