Montezuma, Fontana, Mirko

For the 5th edition of RavennaMosaico [Biennial Festival of Contemporary Mosaic], the MAR - Ravenna Art Museum hosts a comprehensive display on the relationship between sculpture and mosaic art to analyse and investigate the origins, evolution and the different varieties explored by artists from the 30s of the Twentieth Century. It was in that moment, after Gino Severini’s renewed approach towards mosaic art with architectural purposes, that the plastic researches by Lucio Fontana and Mirko Basaldella took off. Mosaic art became a “specific genre” in the late 70s thanks to artists such as Antonio Trotta, Athos Ongaro, Chia and Paladino, and especially thanks to technical and technological innovations resulting from new synthetic materials. The language of mosaic sculpture is therefore evolving and developing in different variations of the concept of “tile” following international researches on assembly and poetics expressed by French Nouveau Realisme and British New Sculpture, and brand new original elements up to contemporary generations.