100 Years of Modern Art

To celebrate the Italy-China Year of Culture and Tourism, the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, with the support of the Consulate General of Italy and the Italian Cultural Institute in Shanghai, presents 57 masterpieces from its collections to the Chinese public for the first time.

In a succession of works in which the great artistic currents are represented - from Impressionism to Cubism, from abstract movements to Symbolism, from Surrealism to Futurism, to name but a few - the exhibition in Shanghai offers a selection of iconic works that guide the viewer on an extraordinary journey through contemporary art. These include masterpieces that have rarely left the Gallery's walls, such as Gustav Klimt's The Three Ages of Woman (1905), or Claude Monet's extraordinary Pink Water Lilies (1897-99) and Amedeo Modigliani's great Lying Nude (1918-19).

It is a multifaceted itinerary that sees not only the intersection of illustrious Italian authors who have made art history-with works such as Telemaco Signorini's Ghetto of Florence (1882), or Giuseppe Pelizza da Volpedo's Flowering Meadow (1900-1903), or even Giacomo Balla's Outdoor Portrait (1902), Giorgio De Chirico's Hector and Andromache (1924), Enrico Prampolini's Portrait of Benedetta Marinetti (1928), to Spatial Concept. Waiting (1959) by Lucio Fontana-but also the presence of international artists of the caliber of Vincent van Gogh present with Arlesiana (1889-1890), Paul Cezanne with Cabanon de Jourdan (1906), Marcel Duchamp with the ironic Porte-chapeau (1917), Man Ray with Venus (1937), and again, two works dated 1937 and 1950 by Jackson Pollock, Joan Miró's Lamentation of the Lovers (1953), and finally Alexander Calder's Four White Discs Red Rubber (1970) are exhibited.

The visitor is led from one modernity to another through an itinerary organized thematically, abandoning historical linearity to offer a vision that unfolds the works on a synchronic plane and opens up multiple possibilities for interpreting artistic production. An approach intentionally linked to the criterion used in the process of reorganization and rearrangement of the rooms of the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome. The project, initiated in 2016 by Director Cristiana Collu and titled Time is Out of Joint (quoting lines from William Shakespeare's Hamlet), probes the elasticity of the concept of time, a time that is not linear, but layered, fragmented, in which the works, which are presented as sediments, weave new and unexpected relationships between them.