There are artists who have had a significant influence on twentieth-century culture and yet few people know them. Bruno Munari (Milan, 1907-1998), whom Picasso defined as "a Leonardo of our time", is one of those paradigmatic cases. This is the first retrospective exhibition dedicated in our country to Munari, conceived by the Juan March Foundation, which travels with a selection of works to the MACA, the Juan March Foundation Museum in Palma and the Spanish Museum of Abstract Art in Cuenca. Through approximately one hundred thirty pieces, it presents his plural activity in full and reveals the breadth of media that the author used in his plastic and visual research, always experimental and innovative. Indeed, in his work we find, as a pioneer, objects as works of art, graphic design as a profession, books as projects and games as investigations.
In 1927, at barely 20 years old, Munari exhibited his work for the first time, alongside that of second-generation Italian Futurist artists. Later he would distance himself from them to develop his own, extremely singular project. In 1930 he would make a turn towards abstraction, which culminated in his first "aerial machine". From that peculiar "machine" would be born his series of "useless machines", curious pieces based on the dynamism of forms. Munari's early interest in this subject would lead him later to investigate with technologies and processes that were then new, such as the photocopier or computer programming. His experiments with light would follow, and a type of works that overflowed with poetic ingenuity, such as the Fossils of 2000, the Travel Sculptures, the Speaking Forks, the Prebooks and the Illegible Books. Parallel to his work as an artist, Munari developed a very relevant activity as a graphic and editorial designer, in which he applied a rigorous method that purges the designed of the unnecessary, simplifies it and optimizes its function, thus making it enduring in taste and in time.
All of Munari's work seems animated by a strong pedagogical vocation. At the end of the 1970s he launched his "laboratories" for children at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, workshops with active proposals to learn by doing, experimenting and playing. The present exhibition includes a "laboratory" specially designed for the occasion, to which a dedicated space is allocated within the rooms where children and young people will coexist with pieces from the great Lucini Alphabet, letters created by the artist from diverse materials. This monograph on the author has been conceived as if it were "a collective exhibition of Bruno Munari" (a subtitle that he himself gave to one of his exhibitions), because it presents a very varied set of processes and results that, with imagination and method, one person produced as if by magic: Bruno Munari.
