The general public knows him to be the goldsmith who was able to create two perfect copies of the iron crown of the Monza cathedralone of which is preserved by Gaiani Foundation and from the museum of the basilica of San Giovanni. But the art world also knows him, and deeply, for a life dedicated to painting and at performanceat the sculpture and at installation.
That world translates today into the solo exhibition of Bruno Freddi “Golden men – emotional journeys” than the gallery Contemporary Villa in Monza in via Bergamo 20 hosts from Saturday 4 May (opening at 6pm) to 6 July. Originally from Mantua and Brianza by choice, Freddi has the atelier Osnago – a few steps away from another artist that few people don’t know, Alberto Casiraghy and the PulcinoElefante editions.
Monza: Bruno Freddi’s golden men
The exhibition revolves around the work that gives its name to the solo exhibition, one large canvas of almost two meters by one meter and thirty that for Massimo Gianquittoin the critical text that accompanies the project, condenses the artist’s poetics: “In fact, the different themes of his research coexist in this work: the human figure – an essential sign of the master’s work -, the wall and the material, the universality of feelings such as love, friendship, brotherhood, but also the repudiation of hatred and indifference, which is replaced by the courageous denunciation of every type of abuse and wrong. Men (and not just women, who he represents more often), are the figures painted with his characteristic trait, incomplete, sketchy, almost hasty, with little descriptiveness, perhaps because human beings do not possess perfection, which is uniquely divine, but on the contrary they are full of great and intense expressiveness”.
Ginquitto reads to us a suffering, torn, desperate humanity in search of peace; men and women, witnesses and protagonists of the injustices and imbalances of the world that has condemned them to their social irrelevance but, what is even more heartbreaking, to the loss of the self, of family relationships, of the sense of community and of every human hope of redemption” . But in Freddi’s palette, in that gold that it refers to the blankets used by those who escaped shipwrecks on boatsman’s willpower and attachment to life are also found.
Monza: Bruno Freddie’s gold sculpture with Anna Turina
«It is the first time that the gallery has exhibited a artist of such a long and intense career – he writes Monica Villaat the helm of the gallery – a choice motivated by the friendship and esteem that I personally have for him, by the fascination for his works, as well as by the influence that his goldsmith’s art had on me when, at the end of during my high school career, I undertook, for a short period, goldsmith studies. The passion for experimentation, which unites us, caused the desire to be born in me
launch a challenge to Bruno: create a work together with an artist from the gallery».
The idea then: propose to the artist a work together with an artist from the gallery, Anna Turinawith which he created a sculpture present in the exhibition which, for the most part, relies on paintings from the seventies to today.
The exception is in the second room: there, thanks to the yes of the Gaiani Foundation and the Cathedral Museum and Treasurefind space for one of the copies of the iron crown, an exceptional opportunity to see up close the masterpiece created in the original between the 5th and 7th centuries AD. The Foundation will grant visitors to the exhibition in the gallery a reduced entry (12 euros instead of 14) on the cumulative entrance ticket to the Monza Cathedral Museum, subject to a ticket to be shown, issued by the gallery itself. In this way it will be possible to “ideally” complete the tour started at Villa Contemporanea, viewing both the original iron crown and the other copy preserved in the museum.
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