On September 10th 2025 in the Ex Chiesa di San Marco - Spazio ARCA in Vercelli, the exhibition ‘Guttuso, De Pisis, Fontana... Italian Expressionism’ will open to the public.
For the first time, a significant selection of works created between 1920 and 1945 from the historical section of the Giuseppe Iannaccone Collection will be brought together to illuminate an extraordinary yet still underexplored chapter in the history of Italian art.
Italian Expressionism, through its exponents such as Renato Birolli, Renato Guttuso, Lucio Fontana, Fausto Pirandello, Aligi Sassu, Emilio Vedova and many others, was able to forcefully assert an independent vision, rejecting the dominant cultural mandates of the time. Through often courageous and unconventional personal exploration, it chose to portray the fragility, solitude, and existential tension of humanity instead of conforming to imposed celebratory models.
These artists have woven a silent yet powerful counter-narrative—composed of contorted bodies, unsettling still lifes, dreamlike cities, figures on the margins, and a raw, disarming everyday reality—standing in stark contrast to the dominant rhetoric.
Among the works on display are pieces by artists celebrated as key figures of Italian Expressionism: Nudo in piedi (1939) by Lucio Fontana, Composizione (Siesta Rustica) (1924-1926) by Fausto Pirandello, Il Caffeuccio Veneziano (1942) by Emilio Vedova, I poeti (1935) by Renato Birolli, Lo schermidore (1934) by Angelo Del Bon, Ritratto di Antonino Santangelo (1942) and Ritratto di Mimise (1938) by Renato Guttuso.
Produced and organised by the Municipality of Vercelli and the Giuseppe Iannaccone Foundation in collaboration with Arthemisia, and curated by Daniele Fenaroli, the exhibition is the first appointment of a five-year exhibition project.
The project, designed to foster a dialogue across different disciplines, it aims to show how creativity and art are enriched through the interplay of expressive languages, creating a unique synergy between the history of the place, contemporary art, and other forms of cultural expression.
Within this framework, each year a contemporary artist is spotlighted through their interaction with the works on display.
This year, the focus is on the talented young artist Norberto Spina (Milan, 1995), featuring both paintings and new site-specific installations. Spina’s practice centers on the layering of personal and collective memory. His work draws from archival images, historical photographs, everyday moments, and iconographies of Italian folk tradition, which, reimagined and superimposed, emerge as fragments of memory.