Exhibition “Il Gruppo Crack” curated by Laura Cherubini

Galleria Gracis presents from March 20 to June 20 2025, an exhibition dedicated to Gruppo Crack, an unprecedented exhibition project with a strong historical and critical emphasis.

Eight Italian artists, with diverse stylistic orientations — Pietro Cascella, Piero Dorazio, Gino Marotta, Fabio Mauri, Gastone Novelli, Achille Perilli, Mimmo Rotella and Giulio Turcato - along with poet and critic Cesare Vivaldi, came together for just one year, 1960, to form Gruppo Crack: a polemical stance against the prevailing academic climate in Italian art and a shared desire to overcome the constraints of Informal Art, asserting complete freedom in terms of styles, media and subject matter.

The group’s experience was documented by a single exhibition at Galleria Il Canale in Venice in August 1960 and, above all, by a volume promoted by Mauri, Marotta and Vivaldi and published by Krachmalnikoff, the publishing house founded by Achille Mauri, Fabio Mauri’s brother.

The Milan exhibition, curated by Laura Cherubini with a critical contribution by Francesco Guzzetti and the scholarly support of the artists’ archives, recounts this still little-known episode for the first time, presenting an extensive selection of works reproduced in the 1960 catalogue. The project also highlights a number of rarely seen relief works by Piero Dorazio, documented at the time in the Crack catalogue.

A catalogue was published on the occasion of the exhibition by Manfredi Maretti. It also includes a facsimile of the original 1960 catalogue, color reproductions of the works on display, archival materials, and critical contributions by Laura Cherubini (Professor of Contemporary Art History at the Brera Academy) and Francesco Guzzetti (University of Florence).

More information

Catalogue