livio bernasconi – carol bove

For its fall exhibition the Giancarlo e Danna Olgiati Collection offers an unusual juxtaposition between two artists from different generations: the Ticino painter Livio Bernasconi (Muralto, 1932) and the American sculptor Carol Bove (Geneva, 1971). Moreover, like every year, the museum presents a new installation of the Collezione Olgiati, its goal being to relate works by the historical and the contemporary avant-gardes acquired at different times.
Livio Bernasconi and Carol Bove owe their artistic identity to the exchanges and cross-pollinations between the Swiss and the American cultures. This year, the American artist Carole Bove is representing Switzerland at the Venice Biennale. Livio Bernasconi, who trained in Ticino and in Italy, lived in the United States in the mid-1960s, a sojourn that produced a rigorous and prolific comparison between his European training, in the field of the Informel, American Pop Art, and Abstract Expressionism. Bernasconi’s pictorial dimension and Bove’s plastic universe – in spite of the different media they use and their different intellectual mindsets – are characterized by the language of abstraction enriched with great chromatic energy.