Forma Edizioni – serie

Industrial archeologists study towns and landscapes created over the past several centuries that were planned to integrate home and work. This ground-breaking book features architectural case studies of company towns in 48 locations - workers' villages, mill towns, mining towns, cité ouvrières, bruk städer, colonias industriales, villaggi operai - many of which are UNESCO World Heritage sites. Extensive illustrations and images document the ways in which architectural experiments responded to the entrepreneurial initiatives that were the basis of these communities. The authors, two esteemed professors whose work focuses on the conservation of industrial heritage, examine the role of architectural and urban culture in creating the identity of these unique towns, and the consequences of their abandonment.

Between 1970 and 1971, Italian artists Paolo Scheggi and Vincenzo Agnetti worked together on a project they called The Temple. Birth of Eidos. Due to Scheggi’s untimely death in 1971 at the age of 31, the project remained unfinished. These previously unpublished preparatory sketches, drawings, and notes, which were shown at the Museo Novecento in Florence, are examined in essays by Ilaria Bignotti and Bruno Corà and texts by Germana Agnetti and Cosima Scheggi, daughters of the two artists and directors of their respective archives. The concept of the project was to create a sacred place, a temple, to contain linguistic objects representing primary forms of community, subjectivity and power, linking these with the artistic and theoretical research the two artists were conducting at the time.

Agnetti died 10 years after his friend and colleague. His research followed a new route but remained closely linked with that idea born in 1968, that “any work, any artistic object, any gesture is a critical reminder of reality and our existence”. (Germana Agnetti).

Beautiful Lies documents Teheran-born, New York-based artist Ali Banisadr’s 2021 show in Florence in honour of the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri. The “beautiful lies” beneath which truth is hidden is an expression used by Dante in describing his writing - and allegorical poetry in general - and it is perfectly suited to Banisadr’s work. His powerful brushwork and strong colours go below the surface of his personal reality, revealing violence and isolation, anguish and wonder, but also memories and imagination. For this show, which was split between two venues, he was commissioned to create an installation of site-specific paintings (also called Beautiful Lies). The text is by Sergio Risaliti, director of the Museo Novecento in Florence.

Four Calabrian artists who trained during the 1970s, four different poetic paths and a communion of intentions. After Marginalia, the first group exhibition held in 1979, their path split across Italy, to reunite in 2021 in an exhibition bearing the same title.

Francesco Correggia held the chair of Decoration Department in Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. He initially focused on performances and site- specific actions, before turning to painting. Luigi Magli lives in Cosenza. He’s interested in semiotics and the language of art, investigating matter and its expressive possibilities through his ‘personal expressionism’. Rocco Pangaro lives in Rende. He teaches Artistic Anatomy at the Academy of Fine Arts in Catanzaro. His research is wedged in the relationship between the artistic intervention and the place that hosts it. Giovanni Vatrella moved to Gorizia. He incorporates reality in his works, showing and concealing it at the same time behind thin canvases.

The book, edited by Bruno Corà, highlights the affinities and divergences of these artists. It is accompanied by a rich apparatus of significant archive images.

This volume presents the artistic career of Klaus Münch through a selection of his work, ahead of an exhibition opening in Spoleto, Italy in October 2023.

Born in Freiburg, Germany, after attending the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara, where he graduated in sculpture, he studied in Munich, specialising in painting. Since then, he has chosen to live and work in Italy, where he pursues his personal artistic investigation of the world. His work moves in the fertile furrow between sculpture and painting.

Starting from the examples of Mario and Marisa Merz, Gilberto Zorio, Giovanni Anselmo and comparing himself with artists of the same age such as Vittorio Messina and Eduard Winklhofer, Münch analyses the complex relationship between creation and space, between colour and shape. Includes essays by Marco Tonelli, Ivo Iori and the curator Bruno Corà himself.

Text in English and Italian.