Magazzino Italian Art presented a four-part lecture series, Politics of Labor in Postwar Italian Art, curated by the 2021-2022 Magazzino Scholar-in-Residence, Katie Larson.
Adrian Duran's lecture focused upon the conflicted middle decades of the 20th century, exploring images and indexes of labor from the second World War through to the early-1960s, immediately before the emergence of Arte Povera at decade’s end. Both figurative and abstract trends will be examined, including the work of Armando Pizzinato, Renato Guttuso, Emilio Vedova, Carla Accardi, Alberto Burri, Leoncillo Leonardi, Lucio Fontana, and Piero Manzoni. Employing this notion of labor as a discursive binder, this presentation hopes to both illuminate key protagonists of the period—many of whom must be understood as anticipatory of the impulses of Arte Povera—and use this layered understanding of labor as a means by which to re-envision the narratives of mid-20th century Italian art.
About Adrian Duran
Adrian R. Duran is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where he is also affiliated faculty in the Office of Latino/Latin American Studies, Medical Humanities, and the Goldstein Center for Human Rights. His monograph “Painting, Politics, and the New Front of Cold War Italy” was published by Routledge in 2018. Duran is presently the Dorothy Kayser Hohenberg Chair of Excellence in Art History at the University of Memphis and on the Steering Committee for UNO's ArteLatinx 2022 exhibition. At some point in the indefinite future, he will finally commit to his study of Venetian painting after the fall of the Republic to Napoleon.
