Municipal Art Gallery
Francesco Tabusso

Some of the Artists on display

LORENZO ALESSANDRI, SILVANO GILARDI (ABACUC), GIOVANNI MACCIOTTA, DONATELLA MERLO, RAFFAELE PONTECORVO, FRANCESCO TABUSSO...

From the post-war period to today, surrealism in Piedmont has followed an original and fascinating path, keeping alive the visionary force of the dream, the unconscious and the symbol..

Turin, in particular, was a crossroads of artists who were able to reinterpret surrealist suggestions in a personal way. In the years immediately following the war, the figure of Italo Cremona stands out for his cultured and allusive painting, in which suspended atmospheres and enigmatic objects build ambiguous and mysterious worlds. Cremona blends irony and anxiety, memory and hallucination, creating images that still surprise today for their evocative intensity.

In the 1960s, the "Surfanta" group was born in Turin, a term that blends "surreal" and "fantastic". The movement was founded by Lorenzo Alessandri and brought together painters such as Enrico Colombotto Rosso, Raffaele Pontecorvo, Giovanni Macciotta, Silvano Gilardi (known as Abacuc), Lamberto Camerini and the sculptor Mario Molinari. These artists, each with a personal language, shared the desire to explore the marvelous, the visionary and the disturbing. Their work represents an important expression of an atypical Italian surrealism, often close to the world of symbolism, esotericism and psychoanalysis.

Even today, the legacy of surrealism and the Surfanta continues to inspire young Piedmontese artists. Exhibitions, reviews and new experiments keep this trend alive, reaffirming the centrality of the dream as an instrument of knowledge and artistic creation.