We can only understand ourselves starting from the fact that man is a great demand for the infinite.

It is on this point that the itinerary of the exhibition La forma dell’infinito/The shape of Infinity (Udine, Casa Cavazzini, 16.10.2021 – 27.03. 2022) unfolds through fifty masterpieces, many of them signed by the leading protagonists of art in the last two centuries: Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne, Alfred Sisley, Henri Matisse, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Michail Nesterov, František Kupka, Vasilij Kandinskij, Aristarch Lentulov, Natal’ja Gončarova, Odilon Redon, Maurice Denis, Jacek Malczewski, Mikalojus Čiurlionis, Nikolaj Roerich, Medardo Rosso, Umberto Boccioni, Pablo Picasso, Emilio Vedova, Ernst Fuchs, Hans Hartung and others.

An exhibition born out of collaboration with, among others, the Belvedere in Vienna, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York, the Musée D’Orsay in Paris, but also the Galleria Nazionale di Arte Moderna in Rome or the MART in Rovereto, the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and the Museu Picasso in Barcelona. Not to mention masterpieces from private collections never seen before which are a real privilege to admire – among them, one of the best Monets, a touching Gauguin, a stormy and great Vedova.

There are sophisticated connoisseurs of art who would make arduous pilgrimages in order to be able to see up close works od art that are rarely exhibit in the West, in this exhibition are presented to the public three paintings by Nicholai Roerich and five paintings by Mikalojus Čiurlionis, which exceptionally have left their Russian and Lithuanian locations. There are crowds of devotees of the brilliant and visionary Kandinsky who will be able to contemplate some of his most significant works, including The Red Square – another prestigious loan from the Tretyakov in Moscow -, a painting that represent a turning point in the in the career of that Russian genius Kandinsky, ad almost the result of an ecstasy and the beginning of a new path for the painter.

The exhibition The Shape of Infinity is a true key to understand modern and contemporary art, even for those who are unfamiliar with art language, discovering one of the fundamental intentions that animated so many painters from the end of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century: to make visible the infinity that whispers to the human mind and heart behind the first appearance of things.

Art exists not to provide frivolous decorations nor to reproduce the appearances of reality, but to go beyond the surface in search of the mystery, the ultimate meaning of life, and to give form to that tension towards the infinite, enchanting and poignant, which makes us unique in the universe

Between brushstrokes and colours, the masterpieces of the greatest geniuses of art, especially from Impressionism onwards, lift the veil of the visible world and allow to come to the surface enigmas, nostalgia, the search for an afterlife, or the pain of a finitude without prospects, in case we are convinced that there is no answer to that question of infinity that we find embedded in our souls. The exhibition presents these inspirations in eight sections: mystical landscapes; the perception of Transcendence; the drama of finiteness; man is a question; the dream of invisible life; awakening the spiritual gaze; the challenge to nothingness; the altitude of consciousness.

Visitors will always be accompanied by well-prepared guides offering a comprehensive, iconological key to each work. They will thus discover why brushstrokes become impalpable evanescence in Cézanne or Redon, and explosions of unseen forms in Kandinsky, and colourful flights in Matisse and almost scratched-out marks in Hartung.

At the same time, the exhibition will make visitors feel one step away from immensity, personally involved: as if those paintings knew us, knew something about us, something profound, and knew how to say it in such a way that we could not have done it in better words.