The collection of the MAN museum in Nuoro, the most important collection, is back on display of modern and contemporary art linked to the history of Sardinia.

From Mario Sironi to Maria Lai, from Francesca Devoto to Giovanni Campus, from Costantino Nivola to Lisetta Carmi. A collective heritage that is rooted in the memory of the place and opens the horizon to the languages ​​of the younger generations.

The MAN museum in Nuoro is pleased to announce The imagined affinities, a large exhibition dedicated to the historical collection that comes out of storage for a reinterpretation and rearrangement project. The path is aimed at the participation of the local community, to activate a reflection on identity issues, but with a sensitive eye to universal perspectives.

From the microhistory to the macrohistory of man: Sardinia, its art, its culture, represent an exemplary case of major facts, a concentration of events that reflect the Italian ones, in a limited but fundamental dimension as a piece of a broad horizon.

From the realism of Antonio Ballero to the divisionism of the former Sironi , from returning to the order of Ciusa Romagna to the bourgeois realism of Francesca Devoto , from the abstractionism of Mauro Manca to the extraordinary lives of Little boy , Nivola And Painters , by the bursting and touching creativity of Maria Lai, up to the research of the latest generations. In this case, site-specific installations created for the museum spaces as part of prizes won thanks to the Ministry’s tenders stand out and where the names of emerging Sardinians alternate with others, called to inhabit and tell the story of the island.

A choice of 100 masterpieces out of a thousand works from the permanent collection punctuate a path rethought in the light of new investigations and in the aftermath of the publication of the catalog published by Officina Libraria with the title “100 Masterpieces from the MAN collection”.

A 360-degree survey of acquisitions, donations and loans allows us to read the connections between subjects and authors, iconographies and variants in a different way.

The installation inspired by a sort of time machine – unlike the classic chronological progression – creates short circuits, comings and goings, flashbacks and leaps into the contemporary – in order to stimulate possible affinities, legacies of style or content in the visitor. The tributes to are important Costantino Nivola (chosen by Adriano Pedrosa, curator of the next Venice Biennale for his exhibition dedicated to exiles around the world) as well as Jorge Eielson (in line with the international celebrations for the centenary of his birth), and to Guido Strazza master of Italian abstraction from the post-war period onwards, linked to Sardinia by his maternal birth and by a strong intellectual friendship with Maria Lai. Strazza donated three monumental works to the MAN, now exhibited for the first time.