From Friday 8 November 2019 to Sunday 1 March 2020 MAN Museum of Nuoro presents, the first museum retrospective of Anna Marongiu (Cagliari 1907 – Ostia 1941), edited by Luigi Fassi.
The exhibition represents an important stage in MAN’s research on twentieth-century Sardinian and Italian art.
The exhibition itinerary develops around three cycles of illustrations dedicated to literary masterpieces created by Marongiu between 1926 and 1930: the complete series of tables A Midsummer Night’s Dream Of William Shakespeare (1930), the illustrations of The Betrothed Of Alessandro Manzoni (1926) and the plates of The Pickwick Papers Of Charles Dickens (1929). This latest work, composed of 262 plates made in ink and watercolour, constitutes the heart of the retrospective: on loan from Charles Dickens Museum of London is today, ninety years after its creation, visible for the first time in a museum .
Anna Marongiu, who died prematurely in an aviation accident in Ostia, is one of the most original and at the same time forgotten figures of the Sardinian artistic scene of the first half of the twentieth century. After studying in Rome and attending the English Academy in the capital, Marongiu undertook an artistic path which crossed, with great capacity for experimentation, multiple techniques such as drawing, pen, etching, oil, burin . Her linguistic register, characterized by a strong expressiveness of the sign, moves between the humorous and the dramatic, the comic and the mythological, finding originality and vigor in all the techniques she uses. The exhibition dedicated to her in 1938 by the Palladino Gallery in Cagliari was one of the first solo exhibitions of a female artist in Sardinia and contributed to the further affirmation of the artist on the national scene, who in 1940 participated in the Exhibition of modern Italian engraving in Rome.
The exhibition is enriched by a short film about the artist , created by MAN and Film Commission Sardegna in collaboration with the Charles Dickens Museum and directed by Gemma Lynch.
A catalog published by Marsilio Editore will accompany the exhibition.
