Pierpaolo Antonello

Artist, graphic designer and polymath extraordinaire, Bruno Munari (1907–1998) first found fame as a member of F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist group in the late 1920s. His earliest paintings and drawings show the influence of comrades such as Boccioni and Balla, but even at this time, Munari’s art drew on a much more diverse range of avant-garde idioms, from Constructivism to Dada and Surrealism, as his collages and photomontages indicate. The aspirations of these movements to transform everyday life inspired Munari to work across a range of media and disciplines, from painting and photomontage to sculpture, graphics, film and art theory. For the first time, My Futurist Past documents the full richness of Munari’s playful, irreverent and endlessly creative career, from the artistic research of his Futurist phase and early investigation of the possibilities of kinetic sculpture--the first “mobiles” in the history of Italian art--to the immediate postwar years during which he became a leading figure of abstract painting, and his subsequent experiments with projected light and installation-based work (reflecting his belief that technological advances only expanded the artist’s expressive vocabulary). The catalogue includes 280 reproductions in color alongside scholarly texts, and reveals Munari as one of the most complex, creative and multifaceted figures of twentieth-century Italian art.