L’Artista allo specchio. Alfredo Catarsini: autoritratti dal 1930 al 1985

2023 marks the 30th anniversary of the death of Alfredo Catarsini, a prolific Viareggio artist who spanned the entire twentieth century embodying a free spirit in which reality, fantasy and poetry have always been the cornerstones on which his graphic, pictorial and literary expressions rested.
To celebrate the anniversary and the close relationship that bound Catarsini to Florence - where over the course of 64 years he exhibited his works 30 times in prestigious venues - the Academy of Design Arts and the Alfredo Catarsini Foundation are promoting "L’Artista allo specchio. Alfredo Catarsini: autoritratti dal 1930 al 1985", the exhibition curated by Rodolfo Bona (Artistic Director of the Alfredo Catarsini 1899 Foundation) which will be presented to the media on Tuesday 17 January 2023, at 11 am in the Meeting Room of the Academy of Design Arts in Florence , in Via Orsanmichele 4.
Then at 16 in the same exhibition venue, the introductory conference will be held which will commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Alfredo Catarsini and which will include speeches by Cristina Acidini (President of the Academy of Design Arts), Rodolfo Bona and Andrea Granchi ( President of the painting class of the Academy of Design Arts); the official opening of the exhibition is scheduled to follow.

Enhanced by the catalog published by Grafiche Ancora of Viareggio with the cards of all the works on display and other apparatuses, the exhibition is an original - and in some ways difficult to repeat - exhibition of 25 self-portraits of the artist, made with various techniques of expression, of different sizes, which span over half a century testifying the artistic evolution of Catarsini whose art has gone through different phases and has been appreciated in Italy and abroad; most of the works come from the Catarsini Foundation collection, but there are also particularly significant loans.
After the exhibitions at Villa Bertelli in Forte dei Marmi (in summer 2021 entitled Alfredo Catarsini Explorations. Works from 1939 to 1982) and at the Lucca exhibition building in spring 2022 (entitled Alfredo Catarsini. Dalla Darsena alla Linea Gotica), this exhibition is the first organized by the Catarsini Foundation in 2023.
In this regard, Cristina Acidini writes in the catalogue: «In the city of the self-portrait par excellence - since Florence includes the well-known collection started by Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici with over 1750 numbers, and among these a Catarsini from 1934, donated in 2005 to the Galleria of the Uffizi - the exhibition validates the great commitment of the "Alfredo Catarsini 1899" Foundation, energetically led by Elena Martinelli, which the Academy of Design Arts is pleased to welcome and enhance».
For his part, the curator Rodolfo Bona writes that «The artist investigated the movement of the figure and the expression of man, recurring themes throughout his production, in the intense portraits of the 1930s and 1940s, in the nudes and self-portraits, in which he has chosen his own face as a field of formal and psychological investigation, recording its physiognomic and intellectual changes. […] The key chosen to present his complex personality as a painter, writer and drawing teacher, in fact, is precisely this genre that he cultivated for a long time and interpreted through different writing methods, ranging from the realist to the caricature register or experimental, with a remarkable graphic variety».
The decision to exhibit this selection of self-portraits in Florence is also linked to the fact that Catarsini has participated in many exhibitions in the capital - from the first group exhibition in 1927 in the Cloisters of Santa Maria Novella to the great one-man anthology in 1981 at Palazzo Strozzi , where over 200 works were on display for three weeks.
And between one exhibition and another, Catarsini often enjoyed self-portraits: «He liked himself and he portrayed himself a lot - writes Elena Martinelli, President of the Foundation which has been promoting Catarsini's cultural work since the summer of 2020 -, intrigued by the expressions and from the traces that the moods of that moment left on his face and from the wrinkles that gradually changed his appearance. They didn't worry him, they intrigued him."

The Alfredo Catarsini 1899 Foundation grows

The exhibition of self-portraits that opens in Florence is also the first act of the new formation of the Alfredo Catarsini 1899 Foundation. From 1 January 2023, in fact, the entrepreneurial consultant Giuseppe Lettini assumes the role of Project manager, while the Scientific Committee enriched by the presence of Walter Sandri (Consul of the Touring Club Toscana) and Renzo Maggi (sculptor and pupil of Catarsini at the Stagio Stagi Institute in Pietrasanta).