Exhibition "Italy in the Bartlhaus"

The exhibitions at the beginning of the 2025 season at the Schriftmuseum are dedicated to artistic positions from Italy.

Patrizia Lonardi from Milan dedicates her current calligraphy to the exploration of signs. Inspired by the Stone Age cave paintings of Lascaux, she creates impulsive gestures and imaginative traces on paper that are linked to emotions, with the message arising from rhythm, colour application and form and addressing the viewer in an intuitive way. The calligrapher experiments with different writing tools, from the classic pen to natural materials. She uses a variety of writing materials, from the finest oriental papers to durable recycled cardboard. She prints, cuts, scores, glues and sews papers together with colourful thread. She repeatedly combines different materials to create effective collages and likes to work in book form. In doing so, she transcends the classic understanding of a book and experiments with the medium. She interprets books as three-dimensional sculptures, creates a monumental copy like a cathedral or hangs a book on the wall like a picture. Her working process is sometimes chaotic and then again calm and majestic, like a Zen meditation.

For Massimo Polello from Turin, the exhibition at the Bartlhaus is like a stocktaking exercise in which he examines the changes in his calligraphic work over the last few years. He exhibited in Pettenbach for the first time 14 years ago. In his current works, he interprets the lines like the beats of an ECG, which records the emotions and movements of the heart and soul, but the rhythm of the letters on the canvas is also like a dance for him. As an expression of free movement in unlimited space, Polello lets the lines run beyond the picture support. He creates fruitful dialogues from apparent opposites and contrasts. Many works are created on a dark background. For the artist, the light-coloured lettering represents the light that comes out of the darkness and brings confidence. Broad lines applied with a palette knife enter into a dialogue with extremely fine brushstrokes. He applies and removes colour with both tools to achieve special effects. In some works, he repeats a word that seems important to him a hundred times in order to assimilate it; the colouristic overlapping leads to changes in structure and meaning that branch out into many perspectives.

Paolo Rovegno was born in Cremona in 1942, where he trained under the painter Mario Benedetti and specialised in figurative painting. In 1970 he moved to Piacenza and attended the Gazzola art school where he learnt the techniques of intaglio printing. Since then, he has almost exclusively designed small prints and bookplates and has created over 300 bookplates using etching, drypoint and aquatint techniques, including some for himself and his family. He took part in various exhibitions and ex-libris competitions and received numerous prizes. The Ottmar Premstaller Collection contains 46 ex-libris by Paolo Rovegno. The exhibition presents a selection of particularly beautiful sheets.