Dedicated to Umbro Apollonio, one of the most prestigious figures in the field of contemporary art criticism, university professor, and director of the Venice Biennale Archive from 1949 to 1968, the museum is mainly inspired by the Neo-Constructivism art movement. It is a unique institution in Italy, housing over 150 works by internationally renowned artists. Among the artists in the collection are Alberto Biasi, Agostino Bonalumi, Julio Le Parc, Gaetano Kanizsa, Manfredo Massironi, Bruno Munari, Shizuko Yoshikawa, Jean-Pierre Yvaral, Jörg Glattfelder, and many others.
The Civic Museum of Contemporary Art “Umbro Apollonio,” founded in 1981 by the Municipality of San Martino di Lupari in the province of Padua, represents the culmination of numerous initiatives aimed at promoting contemporary art. These initiatives began with the San Martino di Lupari Contemporary Art Biennale, promoted by the local APL group and especially by Edoer Agostini, an artist who, starting in the 1960s, exhibited and collaborated with artists from the Gruppo N, Gruppo T, GRAV of Paris, and the Zero Group of Düsseldorf.
The Biennale, held from 1971 to 1985, involved leading figures of programmed and op-art kinetic movements from Europe, South America, and Japan, thereby bringing the artist’s hometown to the forefront of international contemporary art. The body of works is characterized by its diversity in type and technique: paintings, works on paper, and sculptures created with mixed media and the use of a wide variety of materials that radically depart from tradition.
During the same period, the city of Padua itself became one of the major centers for the dissemination of significant artistic experimentation in perception, design, and the new technologies of the time, benefiting from the specialized studies of the School of Perceptual Psychology, founded in 1919 at the University of Padua and renowned for the contributions of masters such as Cesare Musatti, Vittorio Benussi, and Fabio Metelli.
Among the best known, Gruppo N was founded in Padua in 1959 as the association Ennea but found its definitive form in 1960, becoming part of the broader network of Italian kinetic and programmed art. Its members included Alberto Biasi, Ennio Chiggio, Toni Costa, Edoardo Landi, and Manfredo Massironi. The collective, present at the 1962 exhibition “Arte programmata,” radicalized the concept of group work by rejecting authorship and seeking a new innovative form of art. However, due to a strong ethical, political, and regulatory component, the group disbanded in 1966.
Thanks to the experiments in kinetics and perception that made Padua, alongside Milan (Gruppo T), one of the major centers of dissemination of Programmed Art in Italy during the 1960s and ’70s, it is now possible, at the Fondazione Alberto Peruzzo in the former church of Sant’Agnese and thanks to the collaboration with the Comune di San Martino di Lupari, the Soprintendenza of Padua, Verifica 8+1 (VEZ Library of Venice), and Giuseppina Agostini—to visit for the first time together some representative works from that period, displayed in dialogue with other works from the foundation’s collection.