„Va bene, compro tutto“ – Sure, I’ll buy anything – says a drawing by Bruno Munari. Following extensive presentations in the “Rotonda della Besana” in Milan (2007) and the “Ara Pacis” in Rome (2008), the Magnani-Rocca Foundation is currently showing the largest Italian exhibition on this extremely versatile artist, who was active as a painter, graphic designer, sculptor, filmmaker and industrial designer, and even as a writer, until 30 June. Under the simple title “Tutto”, Munari’s work is presented in the famous Villa dei Capolavori, the home of the Magnani-Rocca Foundation in Mamiano di Traversetolo near Parma. Just a few steps away from the halls, according to the foundation, “which house important works by Titian, Dürer, Van Dyck, Goya, Canova, Renoir, Monet, Cézanne, de Chirico, Morandi and many others, the exhibition celebrates one of the greatest creative geniuses of the 20th century, the ‘inventor’ Bruno Munari (1907 to 1998)”. The French art critic and impresario Pierre Restany once described him as the Leonardo and Peter Pan of Italian design.
The exhibition summarises seventy years of ideas and work – Munari began working during the so-called Second Futurism around 1927 – in all areas of creativity, from art to design, from graphics to education. In order to illustrate the creative connections between the seemingly so different objects, the exhibition is organised according to attitudes and concepts. Whether graphic, object, artwork or “tutto” – everything responds to a design method that has become increasingly precise over the years. For Marco Meneguzzo, the curator of the exhibition, Munari is “a very topical figure in today’s liquid society, in which there are no longer any boundaries between areas of expression”. He is “an example of flexibility, of man’s ability to adapt to his environment”. His method consists of “discovering the limits of the things that surround us and wanting to overcome them every time”.
The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue (Dario Cimorelli Editore) with contributions from the most important Munari researchers, which documents the 250 or so works on display.
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