Robilant+Voena is delighted to be participating in Frieze Masters with a presentation divided into two distinct sections. Showcasing the gallery’s focus, first room brings together works by pioneering post-War Italian artists in conversation with international counterparts. The second room hosts a menagerie of artworks inspired by animals across the centuries, a testament to the enduring allure of the animal kingdom as a source of artistic brilliance for artists of all eras. The curation offers a spectacle of fauna, with artworks in a variety of media, including painting, drawing, and sculpture, demonstrating the diverse ways artists have represented the creatures of the natural world. 

In the first room, Robilant+Voena presents a selection of works by leading post-War Italian artists alongside their international peers. Groundbreaking ceramics by Lucio Fontana, three dimensional extensions of his seminal tagli and buchi, offer thought-provoking comparisons with mobiles by Alexander Calder, demonstrating the different ways in which artists in Italy and America pushed the boundaries of traditional sculpture during the 1950s and 1960s. Accentuating the dialogue between Italian artists and the American Pop Art movement, paintings and drawings showcase the rich artistic interchange of this period, with works by Mario Schifano and Mimmo Rotella in conversation with the instantly recognisable aesthetic of Andy Warhol, revealing how Italian artists incorporated and reinvented elements of Pop Art from a uniquely Italian perspective. 

The second room provides a historical survey of animal subjects from the seventeenth century to the modern day. The curation offers a spectacle of fauna, with artworks in a variety of media, including painting, drawing, and sculpture, demonstrating the diverse ways artists have represented the creatures of the natural world. Highlights of the selection include two rare sets of charming Florentine pietra dura panels, dating from the eighteenth century and depicting interactions between wild beasts and pastoral animals, a sort of visual encyclopaedia of nature. Contrasting with these small panels, the regal hound in A Greyhound in a Landscape by Michelangelo Pace, commissioned by Cardinal Chigi in around 1664, bears witness to the popularity during this time of animal portraiture as a mark of elevated aristocratic status. Further animating the space, sculptures by Marino Marini and Francois Xavier Lalanne provide juxtaposing representations of familiar animals. Marini’s Piccolo Cavallo is a haunted, scarred embodiment of the equine subject, its contorted form at odds with more traditional depictions, while Lalanne’s whimsical sheep and Alpine ibex offer a playful, stylised interpretation of humble grazing beasts.  

The historical presentation shares its central theme with Robilant+Voena’s current exhibition in our London gallery, a showcase of animal sculpture and jewellery pieces by artist Harumi Klossowska de Rola. The exhibition, entitled Hayawan, features works drawing from Harumi’s deep engagement with ancient cultures – such as the Egyptians and the Incas – that deified animals as spiritual beings, alongside works inspired by the majesty of the fauna in the forests that surround the artist’s home in Switzerland. Continuing the narrative thread of our Frieze presentation, the exhibition brings the age-old subject of the animal kingdom into the contemporary.