De forma cerrada

When, in 1915, Heinrich Wölfflin spoke of closed form to indicate one of the fundamental concepts of art, he was simply offering a theoretical formulation for what drawing had been doing for over two thousand years—a figurative practice that had given body and image to the gods, to the idea and the ideal. That is the history that the exhibition In Closed Form. A Biography of Drawing seeks to relate. Starting with an Egyptian papyrus, advancing through Greek and mediaeval art to the Renaissance, and from there to the eighteenth century, the historical avant-gardes and contemporary art. A history that goes beyond formalist or psychological theories and sets out to illustrate the changes of a particular creative process. Thus the approach to different artists and their works in the course followed by the exhibition, while remaining a chronological succession, also aims to compose a more complex itinerary of interpretation, in which line—along with form—encloses thinking about allegory, symbol, frame and, more generally, the tactile and intellectual values of the act of representing. The curators of the exhibition are Valerio Adami, international known Italian artist and President of the Fondazione Europea del Disegno (Meina, Italia) and Amelia Valtolina German literature professor at the University of Bergamo.