Radical Light

Radical Light: Italy's Divisionist Painters 1891-1910

This exhibition, the first of its kind organised outside Italy, will explore the complex relationship between the Italian Divisionists and the artists who were later to launch the Futurist movement in the early years of the 20th century.  
 
Centred in Milan, Divisionism is arguably the most significant art movement to have emerged in Italy during the last decades of the 19th century. Dissatisfaction with modern civilization led artists to explore Symbolism – their aim was to represent political concerns and make their art an instrument of social change. The movement also sprang from research into optics and the physics of light. Inspired by French developments with pointillism, and fuelled by a desire to increase the luminosity and brilliance of their paintings, artists developed techniques of applying paint in a variety of dots and strokes.
 
This exhibition will feature around 60 paintings, including works by the main protagonists of Divisionism (Vittore Grubicy de Dragon, Giovanni Segantini, Gaetano Previati) and the Futurist artists Giacomo Balla and Umberto Boccioni.
 
Radical Light is a unique opportunity to explore a lesser-known, yet undoubtedly important, movement – while offering a link to the National Gallery’s great historical collections of Italian art. The exhibition is jointly organised with the Kunsthaus Zurich.