Poetry and creativity: the contemporaneous art and Ascoli Piceno

Here we are, in Ascoli Piceno, to discover a new side of its artistic culture: the particular face, the creative soul of a city that is going to fascinate you to the point that you won’t miss it for any reason: come with us to Ascoli Piceno! Today “Museum” is looking for the inspirations and the creativity of the contemporary art that characterize this great artistic city. To represent the 20^th-century output and artistic movements of Ascoli Piceno, comes the Collection proposed by the Contemporary Art Gallery, dedicated to Osvaldo Licini, a great artist  of Ascoli, born in the little village of Monte Vidon Corrado.

A truly brilliant artistic production where figurative and abstract art come together! Lucini’s paintings will immediately catch your attention: I assure you that you will be totally seduced by the captivating charm and the expressivity of his creations. Your mind will be also impressed by the incredible capacity of those artworks to suggest different moods and emotional atmospheres in a really direct way, being able, at the same time, to show the personality and the itinerary of his creator. 

It is an authentic walk through Licini’s poetic that will involve and excite you!! A walk that you can take to its fullness only here, in the Contemporary Art Gallery of Ascoli Piceno. The museum was inaugurated in 1964 thanks to the painter Ernesto Ercolani, who has been also director of the Picture Gallery since 1949. 

In the beginning the Gallery was devoted exclusively to the graphic art and its firs seat was  the sixteenth-century Malaspina Palace. At the end of the Nineties, the Contemporary Art Gallery enlarges its collection with 40 paintings and 30 drawings belonging to Osvaldo Licini.

Beyond the different stylistic periods, his poetic expression appears in works of art characterized by a pictorial style that is incisive and floating at the same time. It is keen and dynamic but also lapidary. His mark is the direct expression of ideas, and like the ideas, it levitates and slips away. His mark is suddenly vivid but also unstable and uncertain. It is like human condition: between flight and fall, between dream and reality, sky and earth.

Contrasts, ironies and desecrations represent a constant feature in his works of art: beginning from the landscapes, to the abstract geometries, till his original and unique fantastic figures: The Flying Dutchman and the Amalassunte. In the same period, end of Nineties, the contemporary art gallery enlarges its collection with the paintings of other important artists, such as Morandi, Fontana and De Pisis. In 1999, thanks to this great artistic heritage, the Gallery moved to its present seat, in the Cultural Centre situated in the Ex-Monastery of Sant’Agostino.

At present, the Gallery can boast also the collection of fifty preparatory drawings realized by Tullio Pericoli for the decoration of the Garzanti Hall in Milan.