L’opera grafica CARMINA BURANA di Giuliano Collina

As part of the series of thematic in-depth studies of contemporary artists linked by birth or work to the Insubric territory, the exhibition held at Spazio Officina focuses on an important graphic work by Giuliano Collina, Carmina Burana.

The title is directly linked by theme to the historical composition of the same name, best known to the general public for the famous stage cantata composed by Carl Orff between 1935 and 1936.

Giuliano Collina, an artist with varied and profound cultural interests, created a refined portfolio of ten large-format etchings and aquatints in 2004, inspired by the poetic composition and artistically interpreted with great creative spirit.

All the works in the Carmina Burana graphic folder, the matrices and proofs as well as the drawings, were donated to the m.a.x. museum archives by collector Milly Brunelli Pozzi and artist Giuliano Collina. The exhibition, curated by Roberto Borghi and Nicoletta Ossanna Cavadini, presents not only the entire graphic file of the ten etchings and aquatints, but also the twenty copperplates that enabled the work to be printed with a refined technique carried out in Paolo Aquilini's art print shop and the forty-five preparatory proofs up to the bon à tirer.

Also on display in the exhibition are ten large drawings related to each panel, created in pencil, Indian ink, watercolour and collage on paper. In this way, it is possible to witness the unfolding of the creative process from which each graphic work was generated: the way in which Collina's pictorial language, through significant rethinking, reconfigures literary matter according to primarily chromatic principles is thus brought to light.

Born in Intra in 1938, Giuliano Collina graduated from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1960s and has always had his studio in Como. Alongside his artistic activity, he has developed a long teaching experience that led him to teach at the Accademia Cignaroli in Verona and the Università dell'Insubria in Como, and to collaborate on Mario Botta's course at the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio. A painter who has also devoted himself to sculpture, he has cultivated a special interest in the language of engraving in which he achieves levels of pure lyricism.