Towards a history of GAM (1968-2008). Excerpts

The Galleria d'Arte Moderna di Bologna opened in 1975 in the spaces specially designed by artist and architect Leone Pancaldi; it was born in the atmosphere of intellectual fervor that pervaded the city at the beginning of the Sixties. Before GAM’s opening, more than a decade of events, exhibitions and competitions had taken place in hope of its construction, culminating in the opening activities joint under the title “A museum today”.
GAM’s activities, spanning over more than thirty years, were based on a binary project combining the presentation of cultural vanguards to the re-reading of Italian and international art history: from the International Week of Performance to anthological shows devoted to the protagonists of the twentieth century, from its parallel and complementary activity within the Villa delle Rose to the constant monitoring of young Italian artists. Over the years, through solo and group exhibitions, the GAM has hosted and helped define the major movements and the prevailing trends of late twentieth century Italian art. From Arte Povera and the Transavanguardia to the Nuovi-Nuovi, from Body Art to the conceptual poetics through to the recovery of classical techniques typical of the Eighties.

Arte Povera and Conceptual Art

In 1967, the critic Germano Celant wrote the essay Arte Povera: appunti per una guerriglia , singling out an artistic attitude in a swarm of artists, namely, research into "poor" materials, into the choice of materials used and the commitment to contingency.
A wide array of exhibitions, both in GAM and in Villa delle Rose, has featured as protagonists the main representatives of Arte Povera (Merz, Penone, Calzolari, Anselmo, Zorio).The work of such artists involved practices aimed at deconstructing the artistic object so as to reveal its energy, its natural forces and prime matter, thus reverting to «pre-logical and pre-iconographical states, to elementary, spontaneous behavior»(G. Celant). This aesthetical and ethical strategy often intertwines with conceptualist poetics leading to the dematerialization of the work of art itself, through the use of language and quotations as a form of art (Boetti, Paolini, Isgrò, Ontani). «In conceptual art, the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work», says Sol Le Witt. This opens the door to the concept represented by the word, as with the Poesia Visiva (Visual Poetry) celebrated in the exhibition La forma della scrittura curated by Adriano Spatola, held at the GAM in 1977.

Body and Action

The Sixties and Seventies have brought the stirs of political and sexual revolutions, in both cases stressing the presence of the body in the social milieu as well as in artistic research. The Galleria d’Arte Moderna has had a key role in the analysis of this aspect with the help of scholars from the academic environment like Renato Barilli, Roberto Daolio and Francesca Alinovi.
In June of 1977, the first edition of the Settimana Internazionale della Performance (International Performance Week) was held, an event designed to host the latest experiments in live action. Divided according to themes (body, sound, identity), the artists performed in the spaces inside the GAM and other places in the city of Bologna, thrusting it into the centre of international debate. Marina Abramovic and Ulay faced each other naked and forced the public to pass through their bodies to enter the exhibition space (Imponderabilia). Herman Nitsch staged at the former church of Saint Lucia, a pagan ceremony consisting of animal sacrifices and ritual dances (Azione 56). The wounded body was at the heart of the action in Io mescolo tutto by the French artist Gina Pane. Later editions of the series focussed respectively on the Word, Dance and Video Art by probing the contemporary art scene and leaving this incredible documentation of a unique moment for present-day.

The Eighties and Openness toward the International Scene

The return to classical production techniques was the reaction to the artistic climate made up predominantly of extra-artistic mediums. If the Neo-avant-garde, from the Sixties and for over a decade, revived the futurist and dadaist intentions, decreeing the death of art as the production of manufactured goods, in the Eighties, Painting and Sculpture regained prominence in the artistic landscape and not only at a national level.
The Nuovi-Nuovi, led by Renato Barilli, were featured in an exhibition at the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in 1980. In the works of Luigi Ontani, Salvo or Marcello, Jori, critic and art historian, found a renewed passion for the use of colour, in addition to the rediscovery of artistic dexterity. Mimmo Paladino and Enzo Cucchi, leaders of the Transavanguardia theorized by Achille Bonito Oliva, enshrine the return to figuration, albeit stylized and neo-primitivist, which is related to the recovery of the classical canons of art, from canvas for painting to the casting of bronze for sculpture. With the exhibition Anniottanta and the direction of Danilo Eccher, GAM expressed an interest in the kind of works that demonstrated an openness to the international scene, with the solo exhibition by the neo-abstractionist Sean Scully and the acquisition of Eroded Landscape by Tony Cragg.