Cardi Gallery

MONUMENTAL is officially open to the public!
As the title suggests, the exhibition centers around a careful selection of masterpieces that stand out for their impressive scale and ambition, offering a unique opportunity to experience the monumental impact of poor materials and essential gestures.
The artists featured in the exhibition – Alighiero Boetti, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz and Giuseppe Penone – are among the key protagonists of Arte Povera, a movement whose multimedia approach to sculpture and installation transformed everyday materials into works of universal resonance and profound meaning.
With a group of paintings, drawings and installations produced between 1972 and 2006, MONUMENTAL presents an overview of the movement’s evolution as well as the enduring impact of its critical engagement with themes of nature, memory and time. Challenging all forms of artistic tradition, the works on display express the creative potential of found materials like wood, metal and neon lighting.

MONUMENTA runs until December 21, Open Monday-Friday 9.30-6
Saturday 11-6

📣SAVE THE DATE 📣

Cardi Gallery Milan is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition MONUMENTAL, from 18 September to 21 December 2024.

As the title suggests, the exhibition revolves around a careful selection of masterpieces that stand out for the majesty of their size and offers a unique opportunity to explore the monumental impact of poor materials and essential gestures.

The exhibition is spread over the two floors of the gallery: while the ground floor houses works by Alighiero Boetti, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz and Giuseppe Penone, the first floor is entirely dedicated to Luciano Fabro, one of the founders of Arte Povera.

📍Cardi Gallery Milan, September 18 - December 21, 2024
Opening September 17, 2024 by invitation only
Open Monday-Friday 9.30-6
Saturday 11-6

Welcome to our booth at Frieze Seoul! 🇰🇷

Starting today with the preview days and up until Saturday, September 7, we’ll be presenting a selection of works by Jannis Kounellis, Mimmo Paladino, Davide Balliano, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Agostino Bonalumi, Bosco Sodi, Gianpietro Carlesso, Marco Tirelli, Mimmo Rotella, Sol Lewitt and many more!

We look forward to welcoming you at our booth M16

Frieze Seoul
Booth M16
4-7 September, 2024

Hoping that you had a lovely and relaxing summer break, we look forward to sharing with you all the many activities we will be involved in the upcoming season, starting next week with our participation at Frieze Seoul

We will be in booth M16 with works by Dan Flavin, Mimmo Paladino, Jannis Kounellis, Sol Lewitt, Davide Balliano and many more!

🔜soon Frieze Seoul
September 4-7, 2024
📍Booth M16

Image: Mimmo Paladino, Senza titolo, 2023
200x180 cm

Cardi Gallery is proud to present the latest book dedicated to Jannis Kounellis, one of the most prominent voices of Italian Arte Povera.

The volume, published in collaboration with Studio Celant and Archivio Kounellis and released on the occasion of the exhibition Jannis Kounellis held at Cardi Gallery in Milan, takes its cue from the works in the show, characterised by the use of iron and charcoal plates, for an in-depth examination.
The works presented in Milan, all characterised by the juxtaposition of these materials, sheets of iron and coal, are just a few examples of the way in which Kounellis, starting from the late 1980s, when this juxtaposition began to become recurrent, developed and exploited the expressive possibilities inherent in these two elements. By going back over the history of the artist’s exhibitions, from the most recent to those more distant in time, we wish to show how this type of work has been of considerable importance to him and has constitutively shaped his entire activity.

Please contact the gallery in Milan to get your copy

Welcome to our booth at ✨
Starting today with the preview days and up until Sunday, June 16, we’ll be presenting a selection of works by Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso, Pierre Soulages, Dan Flavin, Jannis Kounellis, Donald Judd, Mimmo Paladino, Davide Balliano and many more

📍Booth F14
June 11-16, 2024

Art Basel Unlimited 2024 opening right now!
Cardi Gallery is proud to present “Progetto per la pace”, an impressive installation by Italian artist Mario Ceroli.

Originally conceived in 1969, Progetto per la pace is among the artist’s largest and most significant works of environmental sculpture. Having originally rose to prominence in the early part of the decade with the Roman Scuola di Piazza del Popolo, Ceroli spent years mastering his characteristic use of wood as a sculptural material. Aligned with the emerging trend of Italian Pop Art, his early works appropriated popular and commercial imagery as well as traditional elements derived from the Renaissance.
By the mid-1960s, Ceroli had taken his first steps toward a more theatrical, process-based practice, which prefigured many of the material and conceptual concerns of the Arte Povera movement. 1968 was also the year Ceroli began designing large sculptural pieces for the stage, notably for the Teatro La Fenice in Venice and Teatro Stabile in Turin. The immersive nature of theatre and opera has had a deep influence on his sculptural practice ever since.

Made up of an expansive area of soil dotted with silk white flags, Progetto per la pace towers over the exhibition space. Its 365 flags, each one manifesting a vision of peace for every day of the year, invites viewers into a timeless space of openness, possibility and dialogue. The white flag, traditionally a symbol of surrender, here becomes inverted and repurposed as an object of agency; a blank, colourless emblem that carries no national symbol, and rejects any form of territorial demarcation. Crucially, the title of the work is open to interrogation - artist and viewer are joined in a communal “project for peace”, yet this is ultimately a fragile and precarious endeavour. Ceroli’s work translates the temporal duration of a single year into a spatial dimension, one which reveals itself as finite. The result is an installation that is at once monumental and delicate, wavering between the peaceful assertion of the title and the underlying knowledge of human fallibility.

Cardi Gallery is deeply saddened by the loss of Ben Vautier, an artist belonging to the post-modern avant-garde and one of the pioneers of the Fluxus group. 
To this day, Vautier is still considered one of the leading figures in the fine arts revolution of the 1970s and his heritage continues to inspire numerous artists. 

Between the 1960s and 1970s, he defined himself as the promoter of a new pictorial trend, “Figuration libre,” peculiar writings characterized by different shapes and painted on various media. Throughout his career, Vautier made pictorial compositions based on the contamination of acrylic writing with icons taken from popular French comic strips.
The connection between words and thought thus became the theoretical core of his artworks, while graphism and writing became the artist’s identifying signature.

“Between 1960 and 1966 I refined the problem of self-criticism, of the truth changing art, that of everything is art and nothing is art.” Ben Vautier

Cardi Gallery wants to remember him with some of the pictures taken on the occasion of the exhibition “Ben Vautier. Sehnsucht” held at Cardi Gallery London in 2022

“Gérard Schneider”, our current exhibition at Cardi Gallery London, has been selected by the British newspaper The Evening Standard as one of the 5 best show in town to visit this week!

A leading figure of post-war European painting, Schneider came to embody the Lyrical Abstraction movement that emerged in Paris during the 1950s. Featuring works created between 1956 and 1981, this exhibition traces the evolution of Schneider’s formal vocabulary through the post-war years. The paintings on show demonstrate the artist’s tireless conviction in the poetics of abstraction, as well as the gradual adoption of a looser, more essential visual language influenced by Japanese calligraphy.

Click the link in our stories to read the full article!

Cardi Gallery presents Progetto per la Pace by Mario Ceroli at Art Basel Unlimited 2024

Originally conceived by Mario Ceroli in 1969, Progetto per la pace is among the artist’s largest and most significant works of environmental sculpture. Having originally rose to prominence in the early part of the decade with the Roman Scuola di Piazza del Popolo, Ceroli spent years mastering his characteristic use of wood as a sculptural material. Aligned with the emerging trend of Italian Pop Art, his early works appropriated popular and commercial imagery as well as traditional elements derived from the Renaissance. By the mid-1960s, Ceroli had taken his first steps toward a more theatrical, process-based practice, which prefigured many of the material and conceptual concerns of the Arte Povera movement. 1968 was also the year Ceroli began designing large sculptural pieces for the stage, notably for the Teatro La Fenice in Venice and Teatro Stabile in Turin. The immersive nature of theatre and opera has had a deep influence on his sculptural practice ever since.

Made up of an expansive area of soil dotted with silk white flags, Progetto per la pace towers over the exhibition space. Its 365 flags, each one manifesting a vision of peace for every day of the year, invites viewers into a timeless space of openness, possibility and dialogue. The white flag, traditionally a symbol of surrender, here becomes inverted and repurposed as an object of agency; a blank, colourless emblem that carries no national symbol, and rejects any form of territorial demarcation. Crucially, the title of the work is open to interrogation – artist and viewer are joined in a communal “project for peace”, yet this is ultimately a fragile and precarious endeavour. Ceroli’s work translates the temporal duration of a single year into a spatial dimension, one which reveals itself as finite. The result is an installation that is at once monumental and delicate, wavering between the peaceful assertion of the title and the underlying knowledge of human fallibility.

Gérard Schneider
Untitled , 1968
Acrylic on canvas

“The shape is born, whether lyrical or dramatic, with its colour and technical means, without any reference to external nature”.

Born in Switzerland in 1896, Gérard Ernest Schneider was one of the pioneers of the Lyrical Abstraction movement that emerged in post-war Paris. This movement, named by the art critic Jean José Marchand, and the painter Georges Mathieu in 1947, opposed to the Cubist and Surrealist movements that proceeded it and applied the ideas of Wassily Kandinsky who spoke of personal expression rather than cold geometric abstraction.
Through vivid gestural marks and a masterful use of colour, Schneider’s mature works record the artist’s fleeting, exalted movements in space. Using wide brushes, Schneider applied paint across the canvas in rapid, dynamic motions that, once imprinted on the surface, came together to form an “orchestral whole”. The resulting paintings are musical in essence, each visual element producing a corresponding rhythm or melodic effect that envelops the viewer.

📍Gérard Schneider runs until July 20, 2024
Monday-Friday 10 am - 6pm
Saturday 11am - 6pm

Gianpietro Carlesso
Curvatura 40, 2024
Cedar of Lebanon

Reflecting an ever-changing process, Carlesso’s sculptures incarnate harmony through their organic and abstract form, with an undulating fluidity that constitutes both grace and virtue. Representing the profound ideology of infinity, energy flows along their uninterrupted contours.
Carlesso’s objects are deconstructions of stone, metal or wood. Wriggling over pedestals or the bare floor, they allow the spectator to look through, openings at squares, triangles or rectangles. They seem to intertwine endlessly; there is neither end nor beginning - apparently. The spectator is offered an opportunity of becoming lost in infinity. The eye travels across polished surfaces to be arrested by rough, natural cuts or deliberately applied hatches.

“Gianpietro Carlesso. Prototipi e Sculture” runs until June 1, 2024
Monday-Friday 9.30am - 6pm
Saturday 11am - 6pm

Dive into Gérard Schneider’s powerful gesture on view at Cardi Gallery London

Featuring works created between 1956 and 1981, this exhibition traces the evolution of Schneider’s formal vocabulary through the post-war years. The paintings on show demonstrate the artist’s tireless conviction in the poetics of abstraction, as well as the gradual adoption of a looser, more essential visual language influenced by Japanese calligraphy.
Through vivid gestural marks and a masterful use of colour, Schneider’s mature works record the artist’s fleeting, exalted movements in space. Using wide brushes, Schneider applied paint across the canvas in rapid, dynamic motions that, once imprinted on the surface, came together to form an “orchestral whole”. The resulting paintings are musical in essence, each visual element producing a corresponding rhythm or melodic effect that envelops the viewer. Influenced by Kandinsky’s seminal theories of abstraction earlier in the century, Schneider often employed musical analogies to describe his creative process. “The spectator is free to interpret according to his feelings”, he once remarked of his paintings, “in the same way he might react to a sonata.” In 1945 he began titling most of his works “Opus”, reinforcing their inherent lyrical quality.

May 3-July 20, 2024
Open Monday-Friday 10am-6pm
Saturday 11am-6pm
Free entrance

Tefaf New York previewing today!

We look forward to welcoming you at booth 377 with a curated exclusive selection of masterworks from post war and contemporary art.

Opening hours:
May 9 by invitation only
Friday, May 10 – Monday, May 13 | 11AM – 7PM
Tuesday, May 14 | 11AM – 6PM

Cardi Gallery will be at NY this week!

A selection of exceptional paintings and sculptures that delves into the gallery’s specialist expertise in Italian Post-War and contemporary art is exhibited in dialogue with masterpiece by international artists.
Highlights include impressive works by Mimmo Paladino, Gianpietro Carlesso and Bosco Sodi

Image: Mimmo Paladino, K211, 2014
Mixed media on wood

“What you see is what you see” Frank Stella

Cardi Gallery mourn the recent loss of Frank Stella. One of the most influential American artists of his time, Stella was a pioneer of the minimalist movement of the early 1960s. During that time, painters and sculptors challenged the idea that art was meant to be representative and used their medium as their message.

His explorations of color and form will be forever missed

The exhibition “Gérard Schneider” previews today at Cardi Gallery London!

A leading figure of post-war European painting, Schneider came to embody the Lyrical Abstraction movement that emerged in Paris during the 1950s. This group of artists, which included Pierre Soulages, Hans Hartung and Georges Mathieu, redefined painterly abstraction as a radical new means of personal expression, free from any reference to nature or the outside world. In place of rigid formalism, their art embraced lyricism, spontaneity and exuberant combinations of pure colour to express inner emotional states. Schneider and his peers played a crucial role in establishing a new pictorial language predicated on the evocative power of gesture, one that paralleled the early development of Abstract Expressionism in New York.

Private view
Thursday 2 May 6-8pm

3 May – 20 July
Monday – Friday 10am-6pm
Saturday 11am – 6pm

Cardi Gallery is deeply saddened by the recent passing of Pino Pinelli, one of the leading figures of pictorial experimentation in Italy in the second half of the twentieth century and one of the main exponents of the Pittura Analitica art movement.

We would like to remember him with these installation views from the exhibition “Impalpabili variazioni tattili” held in 2014 at our Pietrasanta gallery

His unique and original style signature will be forever missed

We are open in our Milan premises with the exhibition “Gianpietro Carlesso. Prototipi e Sculture”
Spanned over the two floors of the gallery the exhibition is designed to offer visitors a glimpse into Carlesso’s artistic production.
Carlesso’s objects are deconstructions of stone, metal or wood. Wriggling over pedestals or the bare floor, they allow the spectator to look through, openings at squares, triangles or rectangles. They seem to intertwine endlessly; there is neither end nor beginning - apparently. The spectator is offered an opportunity of becoming lost in infinity. The eye travels across polished surfaces to be arrested by rough, natural cuts or deliberately applied hatches.

📣SAVE THE DATE📣

Cardi Gallery London is proud to present an exhibition of works by Swiss-French artist Gérard Schneider (1896 – 1986). A leading figure of post-war European painting, Schneider came to embody the Lyrical Abstraction movement that emerged in Paris during the 1950s.
Featuring works created between 1956 and 1981, this exhibition traces the evolution of Schneider’s formal vocabulary through the post-war years. The paintings on show demonstrate the artist’s tireless conviction in the poetics of abstraction, as well as the gradual adoption of a looser, more essential visual language influenced by Japanese calligraphy.

Preivate view: May 2, 6-8pm

📍Cardi Gallery London
Monday – Friday 10am-6pm
Saturday 11am-6pm

Gianpietro Carlesso
Interazione 2.3, 2024
Lasa marble

From his Interazione series, an elegant example of Carlesso’s masterful skill at making deliate, yet impactful sculptures on view at Cardi Gallery Milan.
Reflecting an ever-changing process, Carlesso’s sculptures incarnate harmony through their organic and abstract form, with an undulating fluidity that constitutes both grace and virtue. Representing the profound ideology of infinity, energy flows along their uninterrupted contours.

Monday – Friday 9.30am – 6pm
Saturday 11am – 6 pm
Free entrance

We are pleased to announce Cardi Gallery has successfully qualified as a 2023 Active Member with ! To achieve Active status we had to demonstrate that our organisation had implemented environmental sustainability best practice in line with GCC guidance.

Active Membership is not a certification of sustainability nor a claim that we are doing things perfectly or have all the answers - none of us are at this point. We’re all doing our best to assess, report and reduce our impact, setting targets in line with science, taking any actions we can and working out other solutions as we go.

We encourage all of our peers and colleagues to visit the page or website to learn more about the initiative and how to get involved!

Milano Art Week is in full swing and we look forward to welcoming you at Cardi Gallery with a wonderful exhibition of works by Italian artist Gianpietro Carlesso.

The fascination for pure matter and the search for a defined form that gives meaning without depriving it of its natural expressiveness, are the main characteristics of Gianpietro Carlesso’s work, the fixed points that make his path from his beginnings to the present day coherent and recognisable, in its slow, progressive and intense evolution.
Carlesso’s objects are deconstructions of stone, metal or wood. Wriggling over pedestals or the bare floor, they allow the spectator to look through, openings at squares, triangles or rectangles. They seem to intertwine endlessly; there is neither end nor beginning - apparently. The spectator is offered an opportunity of becoming lost in infinity. The eye travels across polished surfaces to be arrested by rough, natural cuts or deliberately applied hatches.
The homogeneity of shape, together with various surface, gives proof of the artist’s craftmanship, of his sensitivity towards the essential qualities of the material.

Open Monday - Friday 9.30am - 6pm
Saturday 11am - 6pm

previewing today!

Come find us at booth A103 - A109

📍April 11 - 14, 2024

Opening hours:
VIP preview April 11, 2024 upon invitation
Friday 12 and Saturday 13 11.30 - 20.00
Sunday 14 11.00 - 19.00

Allianz MiCo, Pavilion 3
viale Scarampo, Milan

“Gianpietro Carlesso. Prototipi e Sculture” is officially open to the public!

Cardi Gallery is proud to present in its Milan premises an official solo exhibition of works by the renowned Italian sculptor Gianpietro Carlesso.
Reflecting an ever-changing process, Carlesso’s sculptures incarnate harmony through their organic and abstract form, with an undulating fluidity that constitutes both grace and virtue. Representing the profound ideology of infinity, energy flows along their uninterrupted contours.
Three-dimensional bodies come to life under the sculptor’s skilled hands - free-standing, vulnerable, extremely light yet spaciously resting in themselves.

Open Monday-Friday 9.30am-6pm
Saturday 11am-6pm

📣SAVE THE DATE📣

Cardi Gallery Milano is proud to present an official solo exhibition of works by the renowned Italian sculptor Gianpietro Carlesso.
Reflecting an ever-changing process, Carlesso’s sculptures incarnate harmony through their organic and abstract form, with an undulating fluidity that constitutes both grace and virtue. Representing the profound ideology of infinity, energy flows along their uninterrupted contours.

📍Cardi Gallery Milan, April 10 - June 1, 2024
Open April 9, 2024 by invitation only
Open Monday Friday 9.30am - 6pm
Saturday 11am - 6pm

Last days to visit the exhibition “Mario Ceroli. La Meraviglia”

Spanned over the two floors of the gallery, the exhibition offers visitors a glimpse into Mario Ceroli’s rich artistic production, ranging from sculptural research to wall-mounted works.

On the first floor the exhibition focuses on the material works, to which the artist has devoted himself since the late 1970s. The shapes and colors of wood, often unfinished, are again the protagonists of pieces such as La Nascita di Venere, Prova d’Orchestra and Inferno, which combine shrubs, trunks and twigs in the creation of geometric silhouettes that elude the bidimensionality of the painting and reveal a consistent attention to the processing of materials.
The choice of materials determines the inspiration, the subject itself, the titles of the works which are sometimes so emblematic. Ceroli often returns to the exclusive use of natural materials, where the operation of burning, placing, choosing particular branches and their adaptation on the planks once again becomes a primal, almost archaic work, without any reliance on color or other elements. In these works, as in “Birth of Venus / Nascita di Venere” (1979-1980), the acts of cutting, burning, nailing, breaking, knotting communicate the forms and memories of an ancient work. The image of the Birth of Venus, faintly perceptible in the folds of the surface of the hay, re-emerges like a childhood memory, of a peasant civilisation, of origins, the wheat fields moved by the wind, the knotted straw, the presence and human wisdom which, in the gesture, has something ancient, sensual, in this gathering and touching.

Cardi Gallery is deeply saddened by the recent passing of Richard Serra, the artist whose grand steel works defined the Minimalist art movement.

“I think that sculpture, if it has any potential at all, has the potential to create its own place and space, and to work in contradiction to the spaces and places where it is created in this sense”

Serra’s sculptures defined a generation of art-making. Working on an unusually large scale, Serra crafted gigantic artworks that enlisted spirals, cubes, and cones of steel enrapturing viewers across the globe.

Cardi Gallery wants to remember him with some of the pictures taken on the occasion of the exhibition “Richard Serra. 40 Balls” held at Cardi Gallery Milan in 2022

Art Basel Hong Kong has officially kicked off!

With a strong focus on expressive, gestural strokes and abstract forms steeped in historical allusion, Cardi Gallery’s presentation at this year’s Art Basel Hong Kong features a group of masterworks from the 1930s to today. Georges Mathieu and Hans Hartung, two masters of Lyrical Abstraction, dialogue with the shimmering effects and bold colours of Alberto Biasi’s kinetic artworks. The impressive canvases by Mimmo Paladino and Giorgio De Chirico offer powerful, mysterious visions that combine different eras of cultural imagery, able to connect ancient history with a deeply personal idiom.

We look forward to welcoming you all at booth 3E06

📍Art Basel Hong Kong
March 26 - March 30, 2024
booth 3E06

Hans Hartung at Art Basel Hong Kong

“Always, always I looked for a law, the golden rule, an alchemy of rhythm, movement and color. Transmutation of an apparent disorder, the only goal of which was to organize a perfect movement, to create order in disorder, to create order through disorder.”
Hans Hartung

One of the defining figures of post-war European abstraction, Hans Hartung (b. Leipzig, Germany in 1904, d. 1989, Antibes, France) is renowned for his singular and innovative brand of gestural painting which left a profound impression on subsequent generations of artists. After studying in his native Germany, the young Hartung settled in Paris as an emigré before the outbreak of World War II, where he befriended fellow artists Mark Rothko, Pierre Soulages, and Julio González. His early work was defined by a lyrical and energetic approach to mark-making, finely balanced between calligraphy and spontaneous expression. In the years after the war, he became associated with both Art Informel and Taschisme, eventually becoming one of France’s most significant post-war artists and a notable influence for American Abstract Expressionists.

📍Art Basel Hong Kong
March 26 - March 30, 2024
booth 3E06

Images: Portrait of Hans Hartung by Denise Colomb, 1954; Hans Hartung, T-1971-H10, 1971