GASTONE NOVELLI
(1925-1968)

15 November 2025 – 1 March 2026

Venezia, Ca’ Pesaro – Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna
Exhibition Spaces – Second Floor

Curated by Elisabetta Barisoni, Paola Bonani
With the collaboration of Archivio Gastone Novelli, Roma

Gastone Novelli (Vienna, 1925 – Milan, 1968) was a leading figures in Italian painting after World War II. This exhibition devoted to his achievement stems from an important donation to the civic collections of some works from the Archivio Gastone Novelli.

The exhibition intends to pay homage to the artist a hundred years after his birth with a complete overview of his development through the collection of the most significant works present in Italian public and private collections.
The exhibition is also an opportunity to reap the harvest of the most recent and important studies devoted to the artist, above all the Catalogue Raisonné of his paintings and sculptures published in 2011 by the Archivio Novelli in collaboration with the Mart – Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto. In 1999, it presented the last major anthological exhibition devoted to him by a public institution, after the one held in 1988 by the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome.

The itinerary of this anthological exhibition at Ca’ Pesaro comprises all the different phases of Novelli’s work: from his beginnings in Concrete Art from the Brazilian years to his Abstract Expressionist and Informal works from the period of “L’Esperienza Moderna”, the magazine that he founded with Achille Perilli, and which featured some of the major Italian and foreign artists active in the late 1950s; from the development in the early 1960s of his very personal poetic, in which images and words reveal the ambiguous nature of language, until the end of the decade, when word and action were again invested with a more explicit ethical and political significance.

Together with the most extraordinary masterpieces, the exhibition presents numerous works hitherto considered lost, which came to light only after the publication of the Catalogue Raisonné, many of which have never been shown to the public.

The exhibition is accompanied by a selection of documentary material to highlight the author’s intense intellectual life, his multiple interests – especially in literature – and the friendships he cultivated with artists, intellectuals and writers.

Admission to the exhibition from 15 November 2025 to 1 March 2026, with the Museum’s hours and ticket.