Curated by Sergio Risaliti and Sebastiano Barassi
in collaboration with the Henry Moore Foundation
until 18 July, 2021, Museo Novecento, Florence
Henry Moore returns to Florence. Nearly 50 years (it was 1972) after the memorable exhibition at Forte di Belvedere featuring the master of English sculpture, the Museo Novecento has decided to pay tribute to him with “Henry Moore. The Sculptor’s Drawing”, an exhibition curated by Sebastiano Barassi, Head of Henry Moore Collections and Exhibitions and Sergio Risaliti, Artistic Director of the Museo Novecento. The exhibition, organised in collaboration with the Henry Moore Foundation, with the contribution of the Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, runs until 18 July, 2021. The Florentine Museum will be hosting a substantial selection of drawings, approximately seventy, as well as graphic works and sculptures. Natural forms – rocks, pebbles, roots and trunks –, animals, but also skulls and then the relationship between the creator and his material, also exemplified by the drawings that portray the artist’s hands or the artist at work in the landscape, are the crux of the exhibition. Drawing inspiration from a reinterpretation of some central themes in Moore’s work, the exhibition offers insights into the importance of drawing in his practice and its relationship to sculpture.
In fact, according to Moore, “The observation of nature is part of an artist’s life, it enlarges his form-knowledge, keeps him fresh and from working only by formula, and feeds inspiration”. The exhibition “Henry Moore. The Sculptor’s Drawing” shines a light on the drawings of this important contemporary sculptor. Over the course of his intense artistic career, not only was he able to measure himself against primitivist and extra-European sculpture and the formal and linguistic experiments of the historical avant-gardes – first and foremost, the works of Brancusi and Picasso –, but also the great traditional Italian art of past centuries, particularly the work of masters in Florence and Tuscany, the great instigators of humanism in art.
