The Fundación Mapfre’s Sala Recoletos (Paseo Recoletos 23) is hosting the exhibition Medardo Rosso. Pioneer of modern sculpture, which recovers his memory and his contribution through a wide selection of sculptures, drawings and photographs of his most experimental and innovative work.
Seen from the present, the work of Medardo Rosso (Turin, 1858-Milan, 1928), which during the artist’s lifetime was barely recognised by those who were then at the forefront of the great transformations in contemporary art, is profoundly innovative and a forerunner of the paths taken by contemporary sculpture: its themes and, above all, its expressive resources anticipate many of the aesthetic concerns that later marked the work of sculptors such as Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti, Lucio Fontana and the more contemporary Thomas Schütte.
In contrast to classically inspired sculpture, conceived as an expression of the immutable through mass and volume, Rosso diluted the outlines of his figures in an attempt to capture the expression of emotions, in a creative process that explored time and again the differences (of light, point of view, materiality, etc.) of sculpting a given figure.
Settled in Paris from 1889, he kept in close contact with intellectuals and artists (Rodin, Modigliani, Degas…) and became closely involved with photography, to the point of incorporating it as one of his working practices, but his career in the French capital was always overshadowed by the powerful influence of Rodin, to the extent that on his death Apollinaire wrote: “Rosso is now, without a doubt, the greatest living sculptor. The injustice of which this prodigious sculptor has always been the victim is not being redressed”.
