One hundred years of modern art on display

Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea

Gustav Klimt's "The Three Ages of Woman," together with a cluster of masterpieces, is on display at Bund One Art Museum.

Titled "100 Years of Modern Art: Masterpieces of the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art," the exhibition is supported by the Embassy of the Republic of Italy in China, the Consulate General of Italy in Shanghai and the Italian Cultural Institute in Shanghai.

The exhibition featuring 57 original artworks, on loan from the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art of Rome, offers visitors a comprehensive view of modern art from 1870 to 1970 through a collection of works representing several artistic movements – from impressionism to cubism, abstraction to symbolism and surrealism to futurism – and revealing renowned international artists like Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), Klimt (1862-1918) and Jackson Pollock (1912-1956).

Visitors to the exhibition are led from one modernity to the next along a multifaceted itinerary that winds through five pathways in the museum's rooms – Genre Painting and Portrait, Symbol and Sentiment, Reality: Subject and Object, Geometry and Abstractionism, and Sign Shape and Color.

One of the highlights of the "Symbol and Sentiment" is Klimt's "The Three Ages of Woman." The female body is the primary subject of the Austrian symbolist painter. This painting swiftly arranges the newborn, a young mother and the senile body of an old woman in the same tableau.

In fact, this is one of the approaches of symbolism where "the hidden" reading of the work is introduced by certain elements related to the use of shapes and color. In fact, these artists had no interest in depicting external reality as it appears but wanted to convey an emotional and spiritual experience on canvas by striving to go beyond formal requirements.

For them, the world was no longer as the eye sees it but as the soul perceives it. Painting comes alive with personal visions that stimulate the expression of the viewer's subconscious mind and the search for meanings linked to the deepest facets of the human soul.

In the last section of Sign Shape and Color, the art of the second half of the 20th century is characterized by reflections that are strongly linked to the painted surface and the matrix of signs. Visitors get a quick glimpse of a series of movements in art history such as abstract expressionism, informalism, spatialism, kinetic art, optical art and conceptual art.

Exhibition info:

Dates: Through January 8, 10am-6pm

Venue: Bund One Art Museum

Address: 1 Zhongshan Rd E1

Tickets: 218 yuan (please make an appointment through the WeChat account "东一美术馆")