One day in the art and life of Concetto Pozzati

There are artists (but also for people) so important that, sometimes, even for a moment, it's nice to forget. Just the time for a long breath. Enough to meet them again like it was the first time. Let them, suddenly, a small detail bring them back to memory, investing you with a whirlwind of emotions that make you feel like when you fell in love with them for the first time. This is the gift that will receive those who, Saturday, December 1, 2018, will be around Bologna, to retrace the works and the life of Concetto Pozzati. Not a random date, but the day when his birth occurs, which, a little more than a year after his death, offers the opportunity to breathe his essence, admiring his work and listening to pieces of life of the artist who has given birth to pop art in Italy thanks to iconic paintings such as Pera. To mark the rhythm of this "Pozzati day" are three significant places for him: the MAMbo (Museum of Modern Art of Bologna), the Academy of Fine Arts, and the Galleria de' Foscherari.

It is 1963 when here, for the first time, the eclectic artist presents his own work: Grande spettacolo ortogonale, a painting of vast dimensions, at the same time personal and collective, realized "live" working alongside Pirro Cuniberti and Luciano De Life. The following year, with the first personal exhibition, a relationship built between the man and the gallery was built on the sharing of visions, sharing of passions, fidelity of commitment. It is a harmony of thousands of meetings and ideas, so indissoluble as to last half a century and destined to continue today. Between 1964 and 2014, la de' Foscherari has hosted 16 exhibitions of Pozzati and, now, transforms what should have been number seventeen (canceled due to the departure of the painter) in an anthological exhibition of the artist entitled Along the years ... Concetto Pozzati alla de' Foscherari. how? Drawing from the tank of his works presented over the years in the Bologna area: a painting for each of the 16 exhibitions that were held there, plus an unpublished one, extracted from the last group of paintings, inspired by the evocative "figure" of the Vulva, on which he was working.

The other unmissable event is at 5 pm in the Aula Magna of the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna (via delle Belle Arti) 54), just where Concetto Pozzati has been the chair of Painting for years.

"My father was also a great speaker and writer...his lessons were very popular...his was a classroom where he did not direct, but above all he listened. And he learned. It was convivio, academy, what we would now call factory or working space. It was almost as if he was teaching from his students"

said his son Jacopo in a recent interview. That same atmosphere will be re-enacted by many of his former students and well-known personalities, from Vittorio Boarini to Emidio Clementi, who will read his writings. There will also be a screening of Via Zamboni 57, a mini film by Maurizio Finotto shot in the artist's atelier.

Among all these special occasions to immerse yourself in the world of what has been called "the corsair of painting", the first will be at 12:00 at the Library of MAMbo. Here the Fondo Concetto Pozzati will be inaugurated, a new room dedicated entirely to the collection of about 4000 volumes between art catalogs and essays, selected and collected by the artist during his life, donated to MAMbo by the sons of the man, Maura and Jacopo Pozzati, and made so accessible to the public. These are the stages of a unique day, the opportunity to discover a person and giant personality of international art who described his work with these words:

"I come from the informal, then I tried to change stains and corrosion, walls and layers in organic ghosts. Figurality, said and not (new) figuration. Making what the ghost and phantom the thing. Everything was ghost everything was thing-figure but everything was presented never represented"