LONDON.- The Experience of Colour is the first exhibition in the UK to focus on the work of a little-known moment in Italian art in the 1970s, when a group of six painters in Northern Italy, reacting against what they considered to be the superficiality of contemporary culture, issued a ‘Manifesto of Objective Abstraction’. Placing colour at the heart of their aesthetic investigations, they produced works that were both conceptual and lyrical. The show features some of the most important pieces by each of the group’s members and runs at London’s Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art from 13 April to 26 June 2016.

The 1976 manifesto of Mauro Cappelletti (b.1948), Diego Mazzonelli (1943-2014), Gianni Pellegrini (b.1953), Aldo Schmid (1935-78), Luigi Senesi (1938-78) and Giuseppe Wenter Marini (1944-2015) reflected an innovative tendency in tune with the international artistic debates of the time, focusing on painting. It echoed the ideas of avant-garde groupings of the early twentieth century such as the Bauhaus, but also the geometric approach of later ‘concrete’ painters and the optical-perceptual research of the 1970s.

Although these six painters shared a profound interest in colour, each possessed a unique and independent artistic vision. Their manifesto was never intended to set restrictions on creative expression, but to indicate the general direction of the group’s work. As the exhibition’s curator, Giovanna Nicoletti, explains: ‘A common denominator between the six artists was the relationship they perceived between colour and light, experienced as new condition of the human spirit, separated from the rest of nature. Aldo Schmid adopted a scientific approach to the subject; Luigi Senesi developed a graduated chromatic structure; Diego Mazzonelli investigated the ‘absorbency’ of black; Giuseppe Marini Wenter dilated space through the use of transparent colours; Mauro Cappelletti defined the different areas of his works with directional lines, and Gianni Pellegrini conceived of his brushstrokes as calligraphic elements possessing a pulsating energy.’

Although tragically cut short by the sudden deaths of two of its key members, Aldo Schmid and Luigi Senesi, the group’s experimentation nevertheless represents a notable contribution to the evolution of abstract painting in post-war Italy.