Alberto Savinio. Souvenir" at Pinacoteca Agnelli

Approximately 75 works including paintings and drawings produced between the mid-1920s and early 1950s make up this major retrospective of Alberto Savinio (1891-1952), curated by Sarah Cosulich and Pietro Rigolo and developed in close collaboration with the Archivio Alberto Savinio and the artist's estate. A Greco-Italian polymath who moved between painting, writing, and music, Savinio played a fundamental role in the development of metaphysical art alongside his older brother, Giorgio de Chirico, in the early 20th century. "Souvenir" presents the artist both as a postmodern intellectual avant la lettre and as a forward-looking figure, organizing the exhibition not by stylistic chronology, but by the central themes of his poetics – memory, myth, imagination, and irony – revealing a conception of art as an intellectual activity capable of transforming fragments of reality into new images of hidden meaning. His "painted collage" technique, in which he selected, recombined, and transformed existing visual sources instead of creating original images, emerged at a time of increasing circulation of photography and printed material, anticipating by decades artistic strategies that would only become popular later – and which echo today in debates about originality and authorship in the era of digital archives and artificial intelligence.