The exhibition aims to be the opportunity for a broad reflection on sculpture, which draws on the juxtaposition of Medardo’s works with some of the greatest masterpieces of classical sculpture housed in the Museum of Palazzo Altemps, in a path of reading and the modernity of the artist’ repertoire, so rendering it even more stimulating and original.
In first-floor rooms, the exhibition envisages not a chronological but a thematic itinerary, through some of the subjects explored by the artist, of which different versions are presented, in a choice determined by reasons not only iconographic, but especially compositional and technical: Rosso’s extraordinary originality in experimenting with absolutely new uses of materials and the resulting variety of material yield is reflected in the selection of works in wax, plaster and bronze, the materials congenial to him in the rendering of what he himself called “fugitive space of the fraction of a second”.
Rosso’s photographs are also exhibited. Starting in the late 19th century, photography acquired for Rosso the value of independent and fully accomplished research, an integral and irreplaceable part of an incessant work of taking a few, essential images, which significantly had an equivalent in that continuous reworking of the sculptures he conceived in the early years of the 20th century, which characterised the last decades of his career. Rosso saw photography as the occasion for a study of materials and light, now unrelated to the confrontation with fact.
The exhibition also aims to offer an opportunity to engage in a dialogue with antiquity including evidences of the relations between Rosso and the classical world in these extraordinary environments, a theme not yet properly investigated in exhibitions.