“Even though I left the country I was born in before I was five, it has remained before my eyes, in my mind and heart as though I had left only yesterday.”
The Galleria Civica G. Segantini displays paintings, sculptures and works on paper relating to Giovanni Segantini and the Trentino artists of his time. These come from the collections of the Mart, MAG and of the Autonomous province of Trento, but also from loans through the generosity of private collectors. The exhibition aims above all to bring together the sources and documents on Segantini from different archives.
Alongside paintings by Giovanni Segantini, such as a Autoritratto all’età di vent’anni / Self-portrait at the age of twenty (1879-1880), Il campanaro / The bell-ringer (1879-1880), Ortensie / Hortensias (1880-1882) and L'ora mesta / The melancholy hour (1892), the Gallery exhibits works by Andrea Malfatti, Bartolomeo Bezzi, Eugenio Prati and Vittore Grubicy de Dragon, who was the mentor of Segantini and Prati, so as to offer an overview of the pictorial production contemporary to Segantini’s own work.
These artists shared, albeit in different ways, the transformation of the nineteenth-century figurative language from a realist to a symbolist manner, arriving at that “art of the future” [“arte dell'avvenire”], to use the words of Segantini, where “the true is inside the soul and is part of the idea” [“il vero è dentro l'anima e fa parte dellidea”].
