Description
The Casa-studio Fernando Melani, on Corso Gramsci in Pistoia, is the house where this self-taught artist lived and worked from 1945 to 1985: a place left just as it was, where home, workshop and work of art are one and the same.
Inside, the walls, ceilings and floors are covered with his works, arranged the way Melani himself placed them. Iron wires and metal sheets hang from the ceiling joists; the rooms still hold piles of materials, experiments with metals and notes, because the artist never threw anything away.
Melani only started painting in 1945, after the war, with landscapes from life, and soon moved on to abstraction. His path runs through Arte Povera, conceptual art and Minimal Art, and in 1972 it took him to Documenta 5, in Kassel.
The city bought the house in 1987, two years after his death, and reopened it to the public in 1998, after a long restoration. It is often mistaken for an installation: for Melani it was the starting point of his "strange artistic activity."
Inside, the walls, ceilings and floors are covered with his works, arranged the way Melani himself placed them. Iron wires and metal sheets hang from the ceiling joists; the rooms still hold piles of materials, experiments with metals and notes, because the artist never threw anything away.
Melani only started painting in 1945, after the war, with landscapes from life, and soon moved on to abstraction. His path runs through Arte Povera, conceptual art and Minimal Art, and in 1972 it took him to Documenta 5, in Kassel.
The city bought the house in 1987, two years after his death, and reopened it to the public in 1998, after a long restoration. It is often mistaken for an installation: for Melani it was the starting point of his "strange artistic activity."