A. R. Penck
24 October 2021 - 13 February 2022

A. R. Penck (1939-2017) is undoubtedly one of the most important German artists of the second half of the twentieth century, one who, together with his friends and companions (Baselitz, Lüpertz, Polke, Richter, Immendorf and Kiefer), was able to express the contradictions of post-Nazi Germany and the East-West conflict through a highly original language, even if conceived in the traditional forms of expression, such as painting, drawing and sculpture.
The Mendrisio retrospective, which includes over 40 large-format paintings, 20 sculptures in bronze, cardboard and felt, and over 70 works on paper, artist's books and notebooks, aims to retrace the main stages of one of the most significant exponents of international art of the 1970s and 1980s.

Aoi Huber Kono
Etchings Acrylics Tapestries
29 July - 5 September 2021

Aoi Huber Kono, a painter who has long been a friend of our Art Museum. We are honoured by her friendship and her long-standing ties with our institute. It is with great pleasure that the Museo d'arte Mendrisio pays tribute to her on her 85th birthday. Born in Tokyo in 1936, the daughter of a famous graphic designer, the Japanese artist is linked to another famous figure in international graphic design, Max Huber, with whom the Mendrisio Art Museum has collaborated for a long period since its inception (his is the logo of our Museum).

Sergio Emery - Works 1983-2003
24 April - 4 July 2021

Sergio Emery (Chiasso, 1928 - Gentilino, 2003) was one of the major protagonists of art in Ticino in the second half of the last century. His path is singular, not linear as in the case of most of the artists of his generation. After starting out in the wake of the 20th century (Carrà, Sironi, Morandi), he moved towards neo-psychasm, which he was able to test in Paris in 1949 with Edouard Pignon. This first season ended with the abrupt abandonment of painting and the beginning of a 10-year period in modern design. He resumed his career in the mid-1960s, first in an informal direction and then in a more conceptual and environmentalist style.

But the great pictorial turning point came in the early 1980s with the cycle of dolls. This was the starting point for the retrospective exhibition in Mendrisio, which spanned twenty years. The final season unfolds in a concatenation of themes, all centred on nature, which seen in retrospect gives the idea of a work in progress of great compactness. The dominant features of a painting between gestural and figurative aspects: the sign, the rhythm, the compositional invention, the insertion of waste materials. A chapter in itself, the last extraordinary cycle, Nel settembre del '43, in which Emery recovers, thanks to a dream and giving free rein to his imagination, an event that happened to him during the war years.

Miki Tallone - [ēx].
24 April - 4 July 2021

Miki Tallone (1968) is an artist from Ticino whose research is based on the exploration of space and time - also in the light of her personal studies in the field of performance - and on the collection of private and collective memories of the places she visits. Particularly important within her conceptual approach is the confrontation, both architectural and environmental, with the territories in which she works and the anthropocentric conception of spaces: her installations, as she herself has stated, are "built around man, but also as an emanation of man". The breadth of Miki Tallone's references is composite, her ability to interact with the environment makes her a restorer in reverse: instead of restoring the original state she evolves from it, integrating it into a new vision in which the public is called upon to interact.

This is also the case in [ēx], the exhibition held at the Museo d'arte Mendrisio, for which Tallone conceived three site-specific works (in the splendid arched cloister and in the large hall on the first floor) that reveal his aptitude for recoding contexts.

In the two outdoor projects(Arundo 1 and 2, and Fluo) Tallone fits into the historical site not by manipulating it, but through a process of assimilation that integrates the space, elevating it beyond the architectural boundaries; in the indoor installation(Demo) the visitor is subjected to a series of silent mechanisms of sociability through the representation of a ritual (the banquet) without diners, whose static and symbolic gestures are crystallised in the use of fabric and complementary images on the wall.

André Derain
Countercurrent experimenter
27 September 2020 - 31 January 2021

André Derain is one of the great figures of the artistic revolution of the early 20th century, both in painting and sculpture, an icon of 20th century art, a friend of Picasso, Matisse, Braque and Giacometti. Derain formed with Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso the triad of artists who completely changed 20th century art worldwide. Derain led and inspired many of the major currents of modern and contemporary painting. He was the heir toImpressionism, the initiator of Fauve painting and one of the fathers of Cubism, as well as the forerunner of the Return to Classicism. In the very early years of the 20th century, a handful of artists completely changed the way we see art. Among the greatest innovators were Derain and Matisse, who spent several years painting seascapes together in Collioure, in the South of France. Between 1905 and 1910, they created a movement for which the term Fauve was coined, i.e. the group of "Savages", because of the bright, fiery colours that characterised their work.
Picasso also had great admiration and respect for Derain, especially at the beginning of the last century. From 1910 onwards, for several years, Derain and Picasso worked together and studied each other. They hung out a lot and their friendship lasted until the 1930s. It was Derain who introduced Picasso to the world ofAfrican art and with Derain Picasso took his first steps towards Cubism. Both were worldly lovers, highly successful men, celebrities of the 20th century arts. But while Picasso's fortunes grew throughout the century, Derain's had an abrupt, momentary decline after the Second World War, thanks to the world of art galleries and the market.
The exhibition organised by the Museo d'arte Mendrisio, as part of its exhibition activity dedicated to the great modern masters, aims to explore all the main aspects of Derain's research, and in particular to help refocus and re-evaluate the particular qualities of his complex and articulated production between the two wars and up until his death.
As far as painting is concerned, the evolution and experimentation with style and themes will be analysed, along with the numerous implicit or explicit references to the most diverse areas of art from all periods. And this in the various genres: landscape, still life, portraits, female nudes, and more articulated compositions . Equally significant, although smaller, is the sculptural production, which is documented with a very interesting group of works.

From yesterday to today.
Contemporary lines in Ticino.
The Collection
10 June - 9 August 2020

Through a hundred or so works from the collection, the exhibition aims to create a kaleidoscope of experiments with the aim of establishing a dialogue between the various works, recognising affinities of language.

The contemporary is understood here as a dialogue between generations covering some forty years of history, suddenly changing from a memory of atmospheres of the last naturalism to a technologically ultra-processed image.

The core of the exhibition therefore lies in the history of the Museo d'arte Mendrisio, from the first biennials dedicated to Paolo Bellini and Aldo Ferrario to the spaces dedicated to Alan Bogana and Marta Margnetti. These are all well-known artists who have had close links with our institute and to whom we owe our thanks.

Works by:

Selim Abdullah, Sibilla Altepost, Paolo Bellini, Franco Beltrametti, Adriana Beretta, Livio Bernasconi, Anna Bianchi, Alan Bogana, Giuseppe Bolzani, Gianfredo Camesi, Rosanna Carloni, Daniela Carrara, Marisa Casellini, Edgardo Cattori, Massimo Cavalli, Milo Cleis, Andrea Crociani, Ilaria Cuccagna, Edmondo Dobrzanski, Tommaso Donati, Marcel Dupertuis, Matteo Emery, Sergio Emery, Renzo Ferrari, Aldo Ferrario, Luisa Figini, Samuele Gabai, Andrea Gabutti, Piero Gilardi, Silvano Gilardi, Elia Gobbi, Aglaia Haritz, Hermanus, Timothy Hofmann, Max Huber, Aoi Huber-Kono, Cesare Lucchini, Marta Margnetti, Simonetta Martini, Paolo Mazzuchelli (PAM), Eleonora Meier, Luca Mengoni, Gianni Metalli, Vincenzo Meyer, Gian Paolo Minelli, Flavio Paolucci, Gianni Paris, Gregorio Pedroli, Adriano Pitschen, Rolando Raggenbass, Tino Repetto, Mariangela Rossi, Alberto Salvioni, Ruggero Savinio, Paolo Selmoni, Fabrizio Soldini, Ivo Soldini, Bohdan Stehlik, Una Szeemann, Miki Tallone, Gianmarco Torriani, Francesco Vella, Petra Weiss, Gianmaria Zanda, Flavia Zanetti, Piera Zürcher