Carla Prina

On Tuesday, 28 January 2025, Tommaso Calabro inaugurates Carla Prina at its Milan gallery, in Corso Italia 47. The exhibition is dedicated to the Italian painter Carla Prina (Como, 1911 – Cossonnay, 2008), one of the key figures of 20th Century Italian Abstractionism.

Born in Como in 1911, Carla Prina grew up in a cultured family and trained between the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan and the Free School of Nude at the Academy in Rome. Returning to Como in 1937, Prina became part of the city's lively intellectual circle. While in Milan in 1934 the Galleria del Milione presented Kandisnky's first solo show in Italy and an exhibition of Italian abstract painters, in Como the focus was mostly on architecture. Between the end of the 1930s and the beginning of the 1940s, in fact, a group of rationalist architects and artists was formed in Como. Inspired by the European avant- gardes, some painters approached abstract art. Together with artists Mario Radice, Manlio Rho, Carla Badiali and Aldo Galli, Carla Prina became one of the leading figures of the Group of Abstractionists of Como.

In 1942, Prina and the Como Group presented their works in the Futurist Pavilion at the XXIII Venice Biennale, followed by an exhibition in the Futurist Hall at the Quadriennale in Rome in 1943. During the 1940s, the artist broadened her international horizons by coming into contact with the second Cubist group, which included Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, as well as Sonia Delaunay. Prina collaborated, together with her architect husband Alberto Sartoris, in the foundation of the Escuela de Altamira in Cantabria (Spain), a creativity workshop for modern art that involved figures such as Joan Miró. Between 1950 and 1951, alongside Miró in Altamira, Prina significantly accelerated her artistic evolution, consolidating her own abstract pictorial language.

Carla Prina at Tommaso Calabro features more than twenty works created between the 1950s and the 1980s, along with a selection of archival material. Initially influenced by Futurist dynamism, from the 1950s Prina's work evolved into free and lyrical compositions, characterised by chromatic and formal experimentation. Geometry understood as calculation and rigour gave way to more dreamlike forms, fluctuating between balance and structure, emanating – in the words of Alberto Sartoris – "a light that no other Abstractionist was able to draw out of the canvas".

Carla Prina was one of the few women artists of the time to emerge in Abstractionism, a movement then dominated by male figures, and represents a unique point of view that enriched the abstract language with a profound poetic sensitivity, which continued to evolve in her works until the end of the 1980s.... read the rest of the article»