An exhibition curated by University of New Orleans fine arts professor Anna Mecugni about Italian artist and psychologist Sergio Lombardo will conclude later this month at the Villa delle Rose, a modern art museum, in Bologna, Italy. “Sergio Lombardo 1960-1970” aims to shed new light on the first decade of the Lombardo’s career.

Mecugni, an assistant professor of art history at UNO, specializes in postwar Italian art and global contemporary art. The exhibition opened in Bologna on January 25 and will conclude March 24.

The exhibition presented in Bologna brings together for the first time in a museum context a considerable group of collages, objects, and installations that are part of four pioneering, but little-known series that were conceived by Lombardo. Lombardo is among the leading Italian artists who revitalized the European and international artistic language since the late 1950s. This exhibition documents how, alongside other avant-garde artists from various countries around the world, Lombardo was already experimenting with strategies to engage the audience in participation.

During the 1960s, Lombardo emerged as a protagonist of the so-called pop avant-garde and an independent figure devoted to research and experimentation of aesthetic strategies later also associated with conceptual art, minimalism and postminimalism.     

The result of in-depth research, the exhibition invites visitors to look beyond the visual differences between the various series and appreciate the common threads that run through Lombardo’s work.

“The main ambition of this exhibition and the research project from which it stems, is to contribute to the understanding of a key chapter in 20th century art history that continues to be relevant today, given the ongoing interest of artists, internationally since the 1990s, in questions of audience engagement and participation,” Mecugni said.

The research that led to the exhibition will culminate in the bilingual volume (English/Italian) “Sergio Lombardo: From the ‘Superpaintings’ to ‘Sphere with Siren,’ 1965-1970,” edited by Mecugni and published by Bruno, Venice, to be released later this year. The book features the most complete visual documentation of these works to date. It presents unpublished art-historical texts by Mecugni and other scholars of postwar Italian art—Christopher Bennett, Elizabeth Mangini and Simone Zacchini—along with a selected anthology of the most important critical texts about these series and of the most relevant theoretical writings by Lombardo, nearly all published in English for the first time.