The Uffizi Galleries enrich their collection with three works by Emilio Tadini.
The Uffizi Gallery in Florence is expanding its art collection thanks to a donation from his heirs, adding three works on paper by the painter, sculptor, and designer Emilio Tadini .
The donation ceremony took place on August 4th, presided over by Uffizi director Eike Schmidt and Melina Scalise, president of the Casa Museo Spazio Tadini and head of the artist's archive, who explained, "The donated works represent recurring elements in the work of the artist and writer Emilio Tadini ."
Italian City (pencil and acrylic on brown paper, 1980s) belongs to the 'Cities' series, places beloved by the artist, which serve as backdrops for human activity. In this case, the human figure is absent. The work donated to the Uffizi clearly highlights the concept of the city not only as "edification" and "construction," "architecture of thought," as Tadini liked to describe it. The work depicts a city with the letters MI, reminiscent of Milan, the artist's hometown and one he loved so much, drawn between balance and imbalance, light and dark.
The Museum of Man (pencil on paper, 1980s) demonstrates the artist's attention to the human condition, between tragedy and comedy, past and future. The work depicts a museum room, in which a man's head sits on a large pedestal, and flying figures peer around it. Tadini's pictorial narrative never abandoned figuration, even during the years when his pictorial research had shifted toward abstraction, because the artist loved to explore humanity, its contradictions and paradoxes.
Le figure e le cose (Pencil and watercolor on paper, 1970s) is a work linked to Tadini's early artistic period. The figures and things are depicted individually or in small groups, while ample space is given to the work's white background. These works demonstrate Tadini's attention to the relationship between humans and things as witnesses to tales, stories, but above all, expressions of the existence of figures, the creation of the world, the distance between us and the world, and all the mysteries related to it.
"This donation," Schmidt commented , "is an example of generous patronage, for which we are deeply grateful to the heirs of Emilio Tadini. But not only that: with the artist's three drawings, the Uffizi's collection [...] is enriched with an important testimony to twentieth-century Italian art ."
Emilio Tadini is one of the artists who characterized the second half of the twentieth century, a multifaceted, intense and still-to-be-discovered figure.