Fausto Melotti. Lasciatemi divertire!

curated by Chiara Bertola and Fabio Cafagna

16 April 2025 - 7 September 2025
GAM - Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin
Via Magenta 31
10129 Turin

In 1972, the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna in Turin dedicated an extensive retrospective to the 71-year-old Fausto Melotti (Rovereto, 1901 – Milan, 1986), consecrating him among the masters of Italian art. In 2025, 53 years after that historic exhibition, the GAM, in collaboration with the Fondazione Fausto Melotti in Milan, is dedicating a new extensive retrospective to the artist, curated by Chiara Bertola and Fabio Cafagna, which tackles his production over a broad chronological span, from the first abstract season in the early 1930s to the mature phase following his official recognition in the late 1960s.

The exhibition, whose title Fausto Melotti. “Lasciatemi divertire!” (‘Let me enjoy myself!’) is taken from an ironic statement by the artist, retraces Melotti’s favourite cycles and themes, his love for music, his interest in writing and ceramic production. It presents more than eighty works from public and private collections and can rely on the large group of the artist’s works that are now part of the GAM’s collections: among these is the large Modulazione ascendente, 1977, located in the garden in front of the Museum.

Fausto Melotti. “Lasciatemi divertire!” is divided into eight sections, following the chronological progression of the artist’s creative seasons and enucleating, in some cases, the expressive constants: poetic and iconographic themes on which he repeatedly returned to over the years.
The heart of the exhibition, architecturally enclosed in the inner rooms, is represented by a layout that finds inspiration in the studios in Via Leopardi in Milan and Via Margutta in Rome, evidences of two distinct temporal moments: the first, dating back to the mid-1950s, is the backdrop to the artist’s ceramic production, the second, roughly twenty years later, to the evocative Teatrini.

The narratives of the other rooms interconnect, sometimes blurring into each other. The theme of abstract art is developed with a room that bears witness to the production of the first half of the 1930s, a period of great concentration and fertile creativity for the artist. This is followed by a section dedicated to the theme of cities and forests, which highlights Melotti’s ability to bring natural and urban landscapes to life using a sign that is always exact, rapid and light. Cosmogonies and ancient myths run through the third room of the exhibition, showing how in the artist’s poetics macro and microcosm, banal and epic stories tend to overlap. The section dedicated to alphabets recounts that characteristic mirroring between writing and sculpture that runs through much of Melotti’s production. While the rooms dedicated to natural rhythms and music, an early and constant love of the artist, offer the visitor examples of his exemplary ability to create suspensions and spacing, in which fullness and emptiness equate and silence becomes the protagonist.

The exhibition is not confined to the rooms on the first floor of the Museum, but extends, with large works, into the atrium, vestibules and garden areas. A large selection of documents and photographs is housed in the Library and the Photographic Archive.

As for the exhibition design, the presentation of the works takes account of historical displays, for example by using the classic I-shaped pedestals designed by the artist. The sections dedicated to Ceramic Production and Teatrini offer visitors the opportunity to experience the atmosphere that characterized his studios, in Milan and Rome, at different historical moments.