"Sign, color, surface", the works of Mirella Mibelli at the Cagliari art gallery

More than 30 years after the last exhibition, the art of Mirella Mibelli returns to the Municipal Art Gallery of Cagliari .

From 19 May it will be possible to visit " Sign, color, surface ", an exhibition that through watercolors, paintings and graphic works summarizes the "adventure of signs and colors" of the Cagliari artist and offers a retrospective on the path of one of the major protagonists of the art of the second half of the twentieth century .

The exhibition, organized by the Culture and Entertainment Department of the Municipality of Cagliari and the Civic Museums in collaboration with the Mibelli Archive, was presented to the press by the Culture and Entertainment Department Maria Dolores Picciau , by the President of the Culture Commission of the City council Enrica Anedda Endrich , by the curator Gianni Murtas .

«Mirella Mibelli's exhibition - explains Picciau - is part of the program to enhance the city's artistic panorama and presents a synthesis of the career of the painter who, with her research, has brought prestige to the Sardinian cultural debate. A due tribute from the city to an artist who opened new paths to the languages of contemporary painting and was able to look beyond the cultural barriers of her time».

The president Anedda Endrich shares the same opinion. «Promoting and valuing Sardinian artists - he pointed out - is a duty for a public administration. Mirella Mibelli is a great artist. Born in Sardinia, she honed her talent with training experiences abroad and chose to live in Cagliari where she taught for many years, passing on her passion to young people. The exhibition is an opportunity for Sardinians who don't know it to discover it, but also an event that enriches the city's cultural offer for the many tourists».

«The exhibition – adds Gianni Murtas , exhibition curator – is a dutiful act to recover one of the most important post-war female artists in the city, both for the role she played and for other aspects, such as her more mature production that we have understood better with time. It is therefore an opportunity to give a historical order to a whole series of Mibelli's researches, not only those of the 1950s and 1960s but also the less investigated ones of the 1980s and 1990s. Mibelli worked on several fronts: she was a very young debutant with Studio 58, the artistic group formed by artists born in the 30s such as Primo Pantoli and Gaetano Brundu who broke the traditional line of art in Cagliari and defined the new horizons of modern art in Sardinia, in the 70s it was at the center of the activity of the artistic high school of the capital and active in the cultural debate of those years».

Between graphic works, paintings and watercolors, there are just over 20 works on display in the halls of the Municipal Gallery and they cover a large part of Mibelli's artistic career, starting from the end of the 1950s and up to the early 2000s. They come from the Mibelli Archive and the Civic Collection. About fifteen, however, from next week will be exhibited at the Cagliari-Elmas airport.

THE ARTIST – Mirella Mibelli was born in Olbia in April 1937 and, after the war, she moved to Cagliari with her family to then complete her studies at the Zileri Art Institute in Rome in 1953. Back in the capital, she joined part of Studio 58 to then attend, in Salzburg, the School of Seeing directed by Oskar Kokoschka, a decisive experience for his training and artistic expression. After having participated, between 1959 and 1960, in the I and II Regional Exhibition of Figurative Arts, he married and returned to the art scene only starting from 1968, when he began to teach pictorial disciplines in the newborn art school of Cagliari. Three different city exhibitions in the seventies tell the evolution of his painting , which achieves the balance between rationality of form and emotionality of vision and moves away from figurative expression. The eighties bring his painting to a complex interweaving of naturalistic ideas and abstractive procedures, but above all they record the beginning of the experiments with engraving which, between exhibitions and collaborations, culminate with the participation in the collective Segni d'Autore in Sardegna of the 1988, an opportunity to take stock of contemporary Sardinian engraving hosted at the Municipal Gallery of Cagliari. In 1989, again at the public gardens, he set up his anthology as part of the Per l'Arte in Sardegna cycle . In the same year, after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, he returned to the Salzburg Academy to participate in the course held by Jorg Immendorf and implement a new figurative recovery. From 1990 to August 2015, the year of his death, Mibelli continues to exhibit and actively participate, as long as his health conditions allow him, through paintings or installations throughout Sardinia.

THE ARCHIVE – Mario Palomba, president of the Mibelli Archive, was also present at the meeting with journalists. Built in 2021 in the artist's home-studio in the narrow alleys of the historic center of Pirri thanks to the will of his sons, Alberto and Paolo Massidda, the archive will be open for visits for Open Monuments.

"Sign, color, surface" will remain open at the Municipal Art Gallery of the Public Gardens of Cagliari until 1 October 2023 and will be open from Tuesday to Sunday. The cost of the ticket is the usual one for entrance to the Gallery (6 euros), but discounts and free entrances are available.

(Unioneonline/vl)