Gastone Novelli: a new monographic exhibition at Ca’ Pesaro on the centenary of his birth

From 15 November 2025 to 1 March 2026, Ca’ Pesaro – the International Gallery of Modern Art in Venice – celebrates Gastone Novelli with a major monographic exhibition set across the second floor of the museum.

Gastone Novelli, N. 1 Miles, 1961

Curated by Elisabetta Barisoni and Paola Bonani, in collaboration with the Gastone Novelli Archive in Rome, the show pays tribute to one of the most innovative figures in postwar Italian painting, marking the centenary of his birth.

Novelli (Vienna 1925 – Milan 1968) explored some of the most crucial issues in contemporary art, pushing painting into uncharted territories where word, sign and image coexist in a poetic and revolutionary balance. In Venice—an essential city in his artistic trajectory—around sixty works recount the most intense period of his production, from 1957 to 1968. A brief yet extraordinarily fertile span, dense with visions, ideas and transformations.

The exhibition opens with the informal works of the late 1950s, in which writing emerges as a visual and narrative trace. This is the case of Era glaciale (1958), one of the two works donated to the museum by the artist’s heirs: a painting that seems to surface from a suspended dimension, “the apparition of a magical language,” as Novelli himself described it. In the 1960s, he abandoned Informalism to develop a new sign-based figuration: canvases dense with indecipherable words, reinvented alphabets, archaic symbols and fragments of thought that together form a personal atlas of knowledge. Works such as Dizzy (1960), Il re delle parole (1961) or Thelonious (1960) reveal a painting in dialogue with poetry, music, linguistics, science and psychoanalysis.

Gastone Novelli, II Sala del museo, 1960

Two rooms are devoted to Novelli’s pivotal participations in the Venice Biennale of 1964 and 1968. In 1964 he exhibited a group of “white pages,” visionary works that opposed in tone and intention the triumphant Pop Art of the time. In 1968, he performed one of the most radical gestures in Biennale history: he turned his paintings toward the wall and wrote on the back of one of them “La Biennale è fascista,” becoming a symbol of a season of protest that would forever transform the exhibition.

The exhibition also includes works inspired by his travels in Greece and the 1964 mountain series, as well as the second major Venetian acquisition, Allunga il passo amico mio (1967), created for the restaurant All’Angelo and now part of the civic collections.

Gastone Novelli, Dizzy, 1960

Beyond celebrating the artist, the exhibition marks an important milestone in Novelli scholarship—from the studies conducted by the Gastone Novelli Archive, to the 2011 Catalogue Raisonné, up to recent international exhibitions. At Ca’ Pesaro, Novelli’s work once again appears vivid, resonant, and profoundly capable of speaking to the present with the force of an inexhaustible language.

Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna

C. del Tentor, 2076

Date

15 novembre 2025 - 1 marzo 2026