Attraversare Genova

Attraversare Genova is an excursus into the art and culture of Genoa in the 1960s and 70s, two decades in which the city was protagonist and experimental hotbed of experiences in the field of the visual arts, architecture, music, cinema, theatre, graphic design and comics.
In a climate in which State industry opened up to art and culture, in the first half of the 1960s, and which then saw the birth of “arte povera”, experimental theatre, and comic strips, Genoa has frequently anticipated events and contributed to the debut of artists who were later to become successful on a national and international scale.
A transitional city par excellence, in the 1960s and 1970s Genoa was a veritable art laboratory in which the creative stirrings of masters such as Scanavino, Borella, Mesciulam, Oberto, to mention only a few, found fertile and dynamic soil, and where artists such as Calder, Pomodoro, Consagra, Carmi, and David Smith were inspired, working in steel factories transformed into art ‘studios’ for their performances. In those same years Genoa proved, by its art galleries, that it was supremely ready and willing to open itself to what was new and different; these galleries enthusiastically embraced the national and international artistic experiences of people such as Kaprow, Laurie Anderson, and Beuys.
Edited by Sandra Solimano, the book – which is the catalogue to the exhibition at the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce – is a meditation on those years (1960 to 1979) and an attempt to rediscover the cultural ferment which saw the participation of Genoese, Italian and international artists living and working in the city, often in extraordinary synergy; it is a metaphorical journey enabling the reader to travel through Genoa, to revive and relive the atmosphere that permeated the city in an intense historic period that is so close to the present day and yet so little explored.

Genoa, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce
10 November 2004 - 27 February 2005


The official catalogue is available at the exhibition bookshop and the Skira bookstore in via Torino 61 in Milan and from 24 November 2004 in all Italian bookstores.