Set up in the new SpazioLAB, the exhibition “A Century of Italian Drawing” is a curatorial project by Andrea Bruciati that explores the extraordinary richness of Italian drawing from the twentieth century to the present. The exhibition brings together more than 50 works, largely from private collections, offering a broad and articulated overview of this fundamental artistic expression, capable of traversing decades of Italian art history without ever losing its autonomy and cognitive function. As curator Andrea Bruciati emphasizes, “Contemporary drawing appears as a fragment of an imaginative diary, often interrupted: spaces of initial and continuous experimentation.” This approach makes it possible to reread the history of the twentieth century not only through visible and canonical production, but also by exploring lesser-known groups of works, fragments of private collections, and interventions that reveal the vitality of a medium capable of conveying thoughts, research, and intellectual processes. Drawing thus becomes not only a technical practice, but a conceptual laboratory—a space in which the artist experiments with forms, signs, and gestures in dialogue with time, memory, and the surrounding reality.
The exhibition presents works by masters such as Vincenzo Agnetti, Enrico Baj, Vanessa Beecroft, Alighiero Boetti, Carlo Carrà, Maurizio Cattelan, Lucio Fontana, Giorgio Morandi, Pino Pascali, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Stefano Arienti, Franco Angeli, Leonor Fini, Francesco Clemente, Giulio Paolini, and many others. Through these names, the exhibition path highlights the variety of languages—from early Futurist and Metaphysical explorations to more recent conceptual and performative developments—offering the public a cross-section of Italian graphic experimentation across a time span that embraces the entire century and beyond. On this occasion, the new SpazioLAB of the Spazzapan Gallery takes on a particular role: an environment dedicated to observation, study, and the direct experience of drawing and the mark, capable of revealing its fragile, light, and intimate nature.
