The National Gallery of Modern Art underwent a recent facelift, re-opened with its inaugurating exhibit Time is Out of Joint. The title, derived from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, alludes to the elasticity of the concept of time, a time that is not linear, but stratified, literally “out of joint”, is based on heterogeneity as the guiding principle of everything.

In this exhibition, there are works by Gustav Klimt, Monet, Amedeo Modigliani, Joan Miro, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Lucio Fontana, de Chirico, and much more. It is a modern art lover’s dream. Taking up the entirety of the large building, the exhibition includes paintings, sculptures, interactive pieces, ceramics, videos, and pieces solely with sound.

In each room, there are artworks with different mediums to make you think about the relation of the pieces together, and it is difficult as most relations are not obvious. In a place where art from different time periods and art movements are put together in one space, they come together in a blank room where the walls and décor have no predispositions on or empowerment over the art. This allows the audience to think about why they are all put together.

The Gallery was laid out in a more random manner, not in chronological order as one might assume. It allows us to appreciate the pieces for their beauty and less about what they are “supposed to mean,” a more subjective way to appreciate art.

Gesture matter sign room: international comparisons.
After the Second World War, art denounces the bourgeois world for having generated the horrors of the conflict. Dissent is expressed through the dissolution of the traditional, designed, recognizable form. This INFORMAL ART developed between the 1950s and 1960s in Europe, the United States and Japan with a language characterized by speed of execution and improvisation. Expresses the anguish of the artist.

Room Of Fontana
The first room dedicated to an international opening passes through this one which is dedicated to an Argentine artist of Italian origin who has worked for a long time in Italy: Lucio Fontana (Rosario di Santa Fè 1899 – Varese 1968), his cuts on the canvases where the artist searches for the third dimension in the painting. Each of his paintings is the work of improvisation, like a piece of jazz. The works in this room only due to the 1991 Teresita Fontana donation.

Room Capogrossi
For Maurizio Calvesi “Giuseppe Capogrossi was together with Lucio Fontana the Coppi and Bartali of post-war Italian art” (from an interview with La Repubblica). Capogrossi (Rome 1900 – 1972) after his studies and a stay in Paris in the years 1928 – 1933, he came into contact with Scipione and Mafai, he founded the so-called Roman School together with Cagli. In 1949 he moved to abstract painting, participating with Burri (which we will see in the next room) in the Origine group and signing the VI Spatial Manifesto with Fontana, Crippa and Dova(1953). In these years he performed the series of “Surfaces” that we find in this room, compositions in which constant signs of elementary simplicity “E” called forks are arranged in a variable graphic texture. The forks can be filiform, dense or macro-signs. It is: “Elementary signs as beautiful as rock graffiti” Maria Vittoria Marini Clarelli at a conference in the Gallery.
Palma Bucarelli in The National Gallery of Modern Art, 1973 State Polygraphic Institute, makes a beautiful similitude with the architectural works of Nervi and Morandi in which the sign is also a structuring element.

Room Of The Informal And The Passing Of The Informal
The lower part of the hall, the one near the Fontana room, is dedicated to Alberto Burri (Città di Castello 1915 – Nizza 1995), another great protagonist of Italian informal art. A medical graduate, he began painting in 1944 while he was a prisoner of war in Texas. Back in Italy and settled in Rome he devoted himself completely to painting. It gained international attention when its tattered bags began to appear in public. It is the image of a desolate and time-worn reality: there are seams, patches, canvases and moldy flaps that hide a wound, a physical and moral tear. In 1956 Burri went from sacks to wood and burnt plastics. Since 1981 it exists in Città di Castelloa museum dedicated to him, the “Palazzo Albizzini Foundation”, since 1989 this institution has extended to former tobacco squeegees. This part of the hall reconstructs Burri’s artistic path from the first humpbacks and tars, to the “Big sack of 1952, to the woods, to the plastics, to the irons of the early sixties, to the cellotex of the last few years.

Hall Widow Turcato African
This room is dedicated to those artists who in the late 1940s had taken a stance for abstractionism. In 1952 the critic Lionello Venturi, who had kept them at baptism, writes “Otto Italian painters” including Vedova, Turcato and Afro.

Room of Rome Sixty Years
Rome in the sixties is the engine of national art, even the presence of cinema is a stimulus to this artistic flowering.

Room of The air of Paris
The room is dedicated to Giorgio De Chirico and Metaphysics, from the Greek beyond the physical, the artistic movement conceived by him and by Carrà in Ferrara in 1917. Unlike futurism, absolute stillness dominates in the paintings of Metaphysics. The scenes are populated by strange mannequins instead of living beings: the space, always defined in perspective, is unreal, appears limited by constructions or landscape elements according to a non-real order, so as to make one think of dreams. Within impossible scenarios, the objects are absurdly approached and project magnified and looming shadows. The metaphysical world is empty and uninhabited. In addition to De Chirico and Carrà other exponents were Giorgio Morandi, Alberto Savinio (the brother of De Chirico) and Filippo de Pisis.

Room of Big national currents in the thirties
The hall is dedicated to the most representative artists of the thirties attributable to the twentieth century artistic movement. They can be considered the “official” artists of the regime of the time.

On the short sides of the hall two large works testify to the art that fascism required for the decoration of public buildings. They cannot be traced back to the twentieth century movement, but can be considered works of Evasion with respect to the cultural and political climate of the time. They are works openly in Dissense with respect to the regime, which use the methods of Expressionism that has already been seen in the Avant-garde hall.

The room is dedicated to Neorealism, a cultural movement born in the period of political commitment of the Resistance which looks at the social aspect and above all at the hard but dignified life of the humble, with language understandable to the masses. Neorealism is expressed in literature with Pavese, Vittorini, Fenoglio, Pratolini; and in cinema with Rossellini (author of Rome open city), Visconti (author of La terra trema) and De Sica (author of Bicycle Thieves and Sciuscià).

Room of New front, neorealism, postcubism
The room represents the artistic research of the immediate post-war period.

Room of Evolution and landings of abstract art
This room is also dedicated to the many artistic voices of the Italian post-war period, with a prevalence of artists operating in Rome.

National gallery of modern and contemporary art in Rome
The National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, also known as La Galleria Nazionale, is an art gallery in Rome, Italy. It was founded in 1883 on the initiative of the then Minister Guido Baccelli and is dedicated to modern and contemporary art.

It houses the most complete collection dedicated to Italian and foreign art from the 19th century to today. Among paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations, the almost 20,000 works in the collection are an expression of the main artistic currents of the last two centuries, from neoclassicism to impressionism, from divisionism to the historical avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, from futurism and surrealism, to the most conspicuous nucleus of works of Italian art between the 1920s and 1940s, from the twentieth century movement to the so-called Roman school.

The National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art keeps the complete collection of international and Italian art from the XIX to the XXI century, composed of 20.000 artworks, including paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations and it represents the major artistic movements from the last two centuries. From Neoclassicism to Impressionism, Divisionism and Historical avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, Futurism, Surrealism, the most remarkable group of works from the ’20s to the’ 40s, from the Novecento’s movement to the so-called Scuola Romana, from Pop Art to Arte Povera, contemporary art and artists from our time, and more are represented and showcased in La Galleria Nazionale’s collection and space.

The new gallery layout was inaugurated in October 2016, based on an original project which, by reducing the number of works on display, introduces the non-chronological reading key to the main exhibition “Time is out of joint.” In addition to the new layout of the rooms, the access area to services, called the “welcome area”, the library and the Sala delle Colonne are redefined. While retaining the institutional name of the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, the gallery takes on a new name in its communication, “The National Gallery.”