Pietro Cascella Inedito. Le opere degli esordi a Roma (1938 – 1961)

The artworks from his early years in Rome (1938-1961), curated by the Comitato Nazionale per le celebrazioni del centenario della nascita (1921-2021) - Tommaso Cascella (president), Lorenzo Fiorucci (secretary), Francesco Cellini, Claudia Terenzi, Francesca Triozzi - established by the Ministry of Culture.

In the exhibition visitors will see an unseen Pietro Cascella, through more than one hundred works, many of them unpublished or little known, dating back to the artist's first two decades of activity from the late 1930s to the early 1960s.

Pietro Cascella (Pescara 1921- Pietrasanta 2008) was a great Italian sculptor in the 20th century, but before arriving at what he himself called "true sculpture", that in stone, which made him recognisable in the eyes of the world, he travelled the road from drawing to painting, with immediate public recognition, including participation in the IV Quadriennale in Rome in 1943, and the Venice Biennale in 1948.
Approximately a decade, the first of the young Abruzzese artist's activity, in which he essentially presented himself as a painter. A painting that certainly did not have a constant sign, identifying a character in the making, but which was well able to grasp the moods of the moment and absorb the rapid linguistic evolutions that were taking place during the 1940s. A path that can be seen in the exhibition through the early drawings of rural subjects that emphasise the artist's bond with his land, up to the canvases in which he experimented with different languages from the expressionist Crocifissione (Crucifixion) of 1942 to the more appropriately post-cubist one visible in Donna d'Abruzzo (Woman of Abruzzo) of 1948. This is one of the little-known early chapters of the artist from Abruzzo, which the exhibition Pietro Cascella Inedito. Early works in Rome (1938-1961), aims to recount.
A chapter that was to be followed, from 1949, by the season of working with ceramics and the first approach to sculpture modelled, together with his brother Andrea, his wife Anna Maria Cesarini Sforza and Fabio Rieti, in the evocative Valle dell'Inferno kiln in Rome. It was in this place near the Vatican that the four young men rethought ceramics in a combination of formal innovation and renewal of popular tradition such as the Mazzamurello (1953), a symbolic work of this period. This experience was rounded off with projects for mosaics and then, towards the end of the decade, the move into the working of metals, iron, aluminium and bronze, and before fully embracing stone, cement, which was also envisaged in the first competition they won for the Auschwitz Monument together with their brother and the architect Julio Garcia Lafuente.
An energetic charge of experimentation around techniques and materials thus marked the entire 1950s and the beginning of the following decade, in which Pietro approached the production of a series of works defined as "sands" made with an innovative technique in which he breathed the atmosphere of the material Informalism of those years by trowelling on large canvases, sometimes assembled together, brick or marble powders in which anthropomorphic motifs emerged, synthesising the anatomical structures of a body.