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 artist’s heirs.

The exhibition pays homage to Novelli 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 Gastone Novelli Roma 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 retrospective at Ca’ Pesaro, which occupies the eight rooms on the museum’s second floor, brings together around sixty works and focuses on the most intense period of Novelli’s production, from 1957 to 1968. The exhibition opens with the informal works from the years of L’Esperienza Moderna, the magazine founded with Achille Perilli in 1957, and continues with the works from the early 1960s, when Novelli developed his highly personal synthesis of visual and verbal language. It culminates with works of more explicit ethical and political significance, assembled by the artist for his solo room at the 1968 Venice Biennale.

Alongside some of his best-known and most extraordinary masterpieces, the exhibition also features numerous works that were long considered lost and have been rediscovered since the publication of the Catalogue Raisonné, many of which have never before been shown to the public.

The exhibition is further complemented by a selection of documentary materials highlighting the artist’s intense intellectual life, his wide-ranging interests—particularly in literature—and the relationships he constantly nurtured with fellow artists, intellectuals, and writers.

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