Terra matta. Art brut a Gibellina

Curated by Eva Di Stefano

Terra matta It indicates a raw and heretical territory of artistic creation, outside the official art system, and dominated by the need for individual expression. Not coincidentally, the title refers to the autobiographical novel by Vincenzo Rabito, a semi-literate Sicilian laborer, an example of creative persistence beyond rules and expectations.
The exhibition features the works of five Sicilian artists, marginalized by fate or choice: Giovanni Bosco, Mario Cassisa, Carmelo Morreale, Sabo, Annamaria Tosini.
Born in the first half of the twentieth century, active in the second half. Diverse in culture, experience, and language, unclassifiable by current artistic parameters, for all of them art was an act of resilience. Some created in emergency situations, using what was available to them, while others chose to remain on the margins, not out of modesty but for a love of freedom.
The visitor will be asked to confront himself with multiple imaginaries in a sort of Wunderkammer among pictorial palimpsests, totems, imaginative recycling, unexpected metamorphoses, emblems, ejaculatory prayers, protective spirits, ghosts of the mind and heart. The artists exhibited all have some connection with Gibellina, either because they are present in the city's museum collections or because they lived there in recent years, as is the case with Morreale.
The exhibition aims to highlight this clandestine heritage of works that are rarely visible, but which bear loud witness to the free and inclusive thinking that is at the origin of Gibellina's rebirth as a city of art, an aggregation of dreams, nightmares, utopias.