The renewal of artistic languages after World War II

What marked the “official” entry into Sardinia of contemporary art was, in 1957, the award ceremony at the 1st Nuoro Biennale, amid heated controversy, of an abstract painting by Mauro Manca.
Under the impetus of Manca, dynamic director of the Sassari Art Institute (1959-69), and of the young Cagliari people of the Transational Group (1966), Sardinia opened up to the languages of informal and therefore of programmed art.

In the same years, the sculptor Eugenio Tavolara started, through ISOLA (Sardinian Institute for Artisan Work Organization), of which he is director, a unique experience of “handicraft design”, reinventing Sardinian craftsmanship in the light of an encounter between tradition and contemporary taste that made it for some time a guiding example in the international field.

The crisis of Modernism is not determined on the island of conceptual experiences, by performance or by environmental art (practically absent) but by the neoconceptual research of the last fifteen years, which contrasts the model of an art focused exclusively on form with that of an art that is communicative and turned to the outside.

While even in Sardinia, the art system began to take shape, with the creation of contemporary museum structures, an Academy of Fine Arts and widespread critical activity, the new artistic generation no longer sees the search for identity as a dramatic imperative but as a precious difference, among the many that coexist in the mosaic of the globalized

world.

Update

20/9/2023 - 12:07