24 may – 12 June 2007

The exhibition Manfredo Massironi. Visual Research and art, Art and visual research is not merely an art exhibition, with works by one of the representatives of the Italian avant-garde in the 20th Century. It is first and foremost a collection of thoughts on perception which are revealed through Massironi’s art. These thoughts form the basis of his artistic development just as much as his creative inspiration.
The installation of the exhibition has been cleverly done by Getulio Alviani, point of reference in contemporary art. However, it is not by chance that this exhibition is being held as part of an international conference on Gestalt Psychology held in Macerata (May 24-27th, 2007) and organized by the Department of Educational Sciences of the University of Macerata, as a result of a proposal made by the International Society for Gestalt Theory and its Applications.
This conference has gathered together a large number of Italian and foreign scholars of Cognitive Sciences interested in a common issue “Relationships and Structures. Developments of Gestalt theory in Psychology and Adjacent fields”. The aim of the conference is to investigate developments in Gestalt Theory in different fields of knowledge: starting with the Psychology of perception, the Psychology of language and communication, Social Psychology, Developmental Psychology, the Psychology of Education and Pedagogy and finishing with contemporary Ontology. It is well known that Manfredo Massironi is a significant member of a group of Italian researchers into perception (including Metelli, Kanizsa, Bozzi, Vicario, Luccio…). These researchers met and then became devotees of the experimental, and partially also theoretical, essence of the Gestalt approach to the study of perception – an approach that Bozzi renamed the Experimental Phenomenology of Perception.
The exhibition may thus be seen as a special lectio magistralis given by Massironi, where the phenomena and the laws of visual organization (relationships and structures) that have been themes of his scientific and artistic research can be observed.
This explains the unusual nature of the exhibition and the catalogue which goes with it. This is why, although the installation of the exhibition has been designed according to traditional criteria, space has also been left for an explanation of each work of art that gives an idea about its perceptual contents (and thus also suggests the scientific bibliography where theoretical and experimental aspects of the problem are examined more closely). This is why the exhibition’s Scientific Committee is made up exclusively of scholars in the field of perception. This is also why the works of art themselves and the layout of this catalogue have not relegated the scientific themes related to this exhibition to the background and thus visitors are encouraged to identify the main focus, so complementing the aesthetic experience of the image with the experience of its perceptual organization.

The curators
Ivana Bianchi, Ugo Savardi