At the center of the exhibition are both the Bassi Rathgeb and Merlini collections. The Bassi Rathgeb collection, assembled by three generations of notable citizens from Bergamo, was donated to the Abano Terme municipality, famous for its thermal baths. The contemporary art collection of Giuseppe Merlini is well known and celebrated, formed by such a wide and substantial variety of pieces that it is able to establish new dialogues and correspondences with works and places from other eras. Despite their obvious differences, both collections were formed with works reflecting the collector’s personal taste as well as the relationships of esteem and, often, friendship maintained with the artists.

The exhibition unfolds through three sections that draw inspiration from three genres present in the Abano collection: Portrait, Still Life, and Landscape.

The Portrait introduces us to the theme of the figure, the particular subject, extended in contemporary art to the figure as such, which undergoes profound changes, becoming the object of the most daring experimentations. The Portrait of Linda Maria Tallone by Cesare Tallone will find a jarring but exciting counterpoint in the decomposition of works by Renato Birolli and Enrico Baj. The male portrait finds in Moretto’s sixteenth-century imprinting a social identity, a fieriness of tone and presence that elevates portrait faithfulness to a canon of affirmation on the world stage, requisites that in the twentieth century will precipitate into the consciousness of the man “without qualities,” like the small men lost in a Piazza d’Italia by De Chirico or in the vaguely clownish figurative wreckage in Sironi’s post-war compositions.

The Still Life allows us to enter into the chromatic and compositional values of painting and, thus, starting from the works of Baschenis and van Beyeren from the permanent collection, a thematic path unfolds featuring Severini, Tozzi, Melotti, Guttuso, all the way to Pirandello, Dorazio, Romiti, and Parmiggiani.

But it is in the Landscape that the metamorphosis between nature and painting is fully realized. Starting from a series of landscapes from the Abano collection, primarily those by Magnasco, Ronzoni, and Fidanza, a ribbon of progressive and fascinating destructuring and mutation of forms unfolds, on one hand into the “viscera” of chromatic paste, on the other into the warp of composition that tends to freeze in abstract versions. Thus, the gaze will travel from Tosi and de Pisis to Morlotti and Mandelli on one side, Rho and Radice on the other, all the way to the ethereal suggestions of Valentino Vago and Claudio Olivieri and to the space without any trace of painting that entrusts the initiative of form to the pure physicality of the canvas as in Fontana, Bonalumi, and Castellani.

A corner of silent sacredness is entrusted to the small sculptures of Wildt, Fontana, and Ontani, which accompany the melancholy of Casorati’s terracotta Head from 1919.

Cover: Enrico Baj, La moglie di Picasso, 1984, Busto Arsizio (Varese), Collezione Merlini