In font we trust! Art and Tipography from the Mart Collection

The Casa d’Arte Futurista Depero hosts an intermedial exhibition including works, posters, experimental publishing and archival documents that explore the complex relationship between art and typography in the twentieth century.
Held in the halls of the museum founded by Fortunato Depero, maestro of the Futurist typographical revolution, the exhibition starts off from the experimentation proposed by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in his manifesto L’immaginazione senza fili e le parole in libertà (1913). Here for the first time the simultaneous use of several typographical characters also in different sizes is theorised, a practice that features throughout the Futurist’s entire publishing output, starting from the famed Zang tumb tuuum. Adrianopoli ottobre 1912 parole in libertà (1914).
The innovations introduced by Marinetti and his fellows are also echoed in the typographical research implemented by the Dadaists and the Russian avant-garde. These important events are documented in the exhibition by remarkable editions for the most preserved in the Archivio di Nuova Scrittura and in the Denza library-archives, also home to the numerous testimonies of experimental periodical publishing in the second half of the twentieth century included in the exhibition.
From the fifties onwards the legacy of the historical avant-garde once again burgeons in the field of verbovisual research, centred on the relations between word and image. These include movements like Concrete Poetry, represented among others by Carlo Belloli and by the Noigandres group, Visual Poetrywith the artists of Gruppo 70, Fluxus and Conceptual Art. These practices characterize Mart’s lines of investigation and are the protagonists of the show held in the spaces of Casa Depero, which among others features the works of Vincenzo Agnetti, Alain Arias-Misson, Alighiero Boetti, Jean-Francois Bory, Henry Chopin, Paul De Vree, Emilio Isgrò, Ketty La Rocca, Lucia Marcucci, Stelio Maria Martini, Maurizio Nannucci, Giulia Niccolai and Giovanna Sandri. 
The array of exhibits concludes with Mail Art works, such as Piermarino Ciani’s series of artist’s stamps, Pablo Echaurren’s collages and creations of some undisputed protagonists of international graphic design, such as AG Fronzoni and Leonardo Sonnoli, who for the exhibition created a poster available to all visitors. 

Curated by Nicoletta Boschiero e Duccio Dogheria

Source: www.mart.tn.it