A major retrospective of the works of Giacomo Balla, the leading light of Italian Futurism, has opened in Milan to mark the 50th anniversary of the artist's death.
Around 200 oil paintings, watercolours, pastels, assemblages and sculptures are on show at the Palazzo Reale for the exhibition, which is also just one year shy of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Futurism itself.
Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti launched the movement on February 20 in 1909 with a manifesto expressing the key ideas of the Futurists, which included a love of technology, industry and speed, and a loathing of the past.
The Milan show concentrates on the 30 years Balla spent on Futurist painting, using rampant colours and violent energy to extol the merits of a new, technologically advanced age.
On loan from international institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Musum in Madrid, the works are arranged chronologically. The exhibition kicks off with Balla's early Divisionist period, when the Turin-born artist moved to Rome and used daubs of pigment to create the visual effect of intense single colours in intimate, domestic portraits such as The Mother (1901) as well as pictures stemming from the artist's social conscience like The Worker's Day (1904).
Balla's triumphant move into Futurism is catalogued in the next section with paintings that tried to capture form in movement - Girl Running on A Balcony (1912), a blur of boots, flesh and skirts, and his juddering series depicting Mercury passing in front of the sun (1914) are on display here.
Next come Balla's move into 3D, which he accomplished by incorporating silver foil, sheet metal and coloured paper into his paintings, sparking reflective lights to capture the fleeting mobility of form. On display in this section is Balla's first Plastic Complex (1914), recently rediscovered in the private Odescalchi collection at Bracciano Castle.
Futurism's belief in actively forging the values of a united Italy forms the focus of the show's penultimate section, which includes patriotic works linked to World War I propaganda and allegorical paintings praising scientific advances such as Science Against Obscurantism (1920).
The show finishes with an array of post-war works that largely left behind machines and technology to concentrate on energy and sensations to be found in nature. Among the key works here is Forces of Landscape + Watermelon (1917-18), a canvas filled with swirls, spikes and rainbows traced in fruity red, white and green.
In 1929, Balla decided to abandon Futurism and dedicate himself to his figurative art, which - rather less well received - is not on show.
