Hybridisations, non-artistic materials, contamination of different idioms, new space/time relationships, experimental techniques, altered perceptions: the emblematic features of 20th century art include the breakdown of all possible boundaries between fields and forms of expression, in a clear, mocking break with tradition.
The historic avant-garde movements – particularly Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism – which opened the twentieth century to the utmost freedom of cross-contamination have left us an imposing heritage which is still readable against the backdrop of increasingly complex studies.
The conceptual approach to art (which shifts the meaning of the work of art from the aesthetic object itself to the thoughts of the person who created it and the person looking at it) and the decline of the concept of mimesis (art as imitation of reality) fully legitimated the new artistic practices which constitute one of the founding elements of contemporary ways of working. This section compares new idioms, which are in actual fact sometimes ancient methods, reappropriated and updated, offering a heterogeneous selection of individual work linked with forms and techniques such as photography, video, installation, the polymaterial object, the monochrome, assembly, collage and “objets trouvés”. Lyrical, ironic, dramatic, playful, intelligent, minimal or exuberant, diaphanous or Baroque in style, cold or aggressive, the works in this section are by a variety of artists and present a vast overview of poetics and experiences since the sixties.
