NEW YORK - Sun, water, sand: common materials and natural elements worked with the mason's technique and the dream is to make them as big as buildings. This is how the Sardinian artist Costantino Nivola explained his "Sandscapes", made on the Atlantic beach of Long Island where he had moved in 1948 and where he had begun to create works such as those exhibited tomorrow at Magazzino Italian Art, the museum in the Valle dell ' Hudson dedicated to Italian art from the mid-1900s to the contemporary. Created in collaboration with the Nivola Foundation and the artist's family, the exhibition presents 50 reliefs made with the "sandcasting" technique, concrete sculptures and architectural "maquettes" between the early 1950s and 1970s. Many works come from the artist's family,others from American musics such as the Whitney. According to Antonella Camarda, director of the Nivola Museum, "during the exhibition, an ideal thread will connect Orani and New York. If the pandemic has divided the two Atlantic shores, Nivola will bring us together".
Nivola's is "the story of an Italian immigrant who made the United States his land, finding similar spirits in an environment of architects and artists such as Le Corbusier and de Kooning", explains Teresa Kittler, curator of the exhibition. Born in Orani, in the heart of Barbagia, Nivola emigrated to the USA in 1938 with his wife Ruth Guggenheim to escape the racial laws of fascist Italy and in New York he soon became part of the art scene: Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner and Saul Steinberg were among the closest friends. In 1948 he moved to Springs, on the east coast of Long Island, where many exponents of abstract expressionism had already moved.
The "sandcasting" technique was born for fun, from sand constructions with children on the beach. Nivola translates his interests in Sardinian iconography, abstractionism and the human figure into motifs dug "in negative" in the damp sand on which mixtures of plaster and sand or cement were poured which, once dried, became sculptural reliefs. Encouraged by Le Corbusier whom he had met in the 1940s, Nivola began to accept large-scale works such as, in 1954, the mural in the Olivetti showroom on 5th Avenue, two of the three scale models loaned by the Boca Raton museum are on display. in Florida and the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover in Massachusetts. Other "maquettes" prepare the facade of the Bridgeport Post,the headquarters of a Connecticut newspaper, decorated like newspaper pages. Finally, we arrive at the model for the Legislative Office Building in Albany, New York, the last "sandcast" on a large scale, made for the atrium of the building rather than the external facade.
According to Vittorio Calabrese, the director of Magazzino, the exhibition is just the beginning of a long journey: many of Nivola's works, including the 17 still standing in New York City, are in poor condition and the goal is to sensitize the public and authorities for their protection.