The exhibition Je suis l’autre. Giacometti, Picasso e gli altri. Il Primitivismo nella scultura del Novecento, is being held at the Grandi Aule of Diocletian’s baths and features eighty pieces of art, from sculptures executed by the great masters of the 20th century – including Pietro Consagra – to masterpieces of ethnic art.

The exhibition, supported by Museo Nazionale Romano, director Daniela Porro, and by Museo delle Culture di Lugano with Electa, is curated by Francesco Paolo Campione and Maria Grazia Messina.

The exhibition’s catalogue is published by Electa, curated by Francesco Paolo Campione and Maria Grazia Messina, and includes numerous essays and a rich anthology about “primitive art” from the point of view of 20th-century artists and intellectuals, which offer an ample and well documented multifocal vision of the meanings and value of the pieces in the exhibition, and in general on the theme of Primitivism in 20th-century art.

The exhibition is designed to be a journey through a series of themeswhich correspond to the principal characteristics of the internal growth associated to the 20th-century artist’s and the cultures that inspired them.
An artistic current which reveals the tensions and profound needs of each individual, delving fearlessly into the world of myth and into the sphere of utopia and politics. At least three generations of artistsadhered to Primitivism, as a part of a path of personal growth.

In just a few decades the appearance of so many things was revolutionised by the intrusion of new art styles, which roughly outlined body shapes, distorting them until they were barely recognisable, but which – composing together elements previously unknown ­– started autonomously searching for their meaning.
Early 20th-century sculpting had to tenaciously fight to affirm that accurate depiction of reality couldn’t be automatically considered the measure of all art. Once freed of ideological inhibitions, it embodied entities in search of their own principal of justification. It became a torment which found its primary foundation in substance and at the same time freed western sculpting from the conformism of physiognomy forever.

Artists: Karel Appel, Hans Arp, Kenneth Armitage, Georges Braque, Serge Brignoni, Agustín Cárdenas, Lynn Chadwick, André Derain, Jean Dubuffet, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, Alberto Giacometti, Julio González, Henry Heerup, Ludwig Ernst Kirchner, Yves Klein, Jacques Lipchitz, Man Ray, André Masson, Joan Miró, Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, Pablo Picasso, Germaine Richier, Salvatore Scarpitta, Fritz Wotruba, Enrico Baj, Mirko Basaldella, Adriana Bisi Fabbri, Alik Cavaliere, Pietro Consagra, Roberto Crippa, Agenore Fabbri, Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Marino Marini, Luciano Minguzzi, Costantino Nivola, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Regina [Cassolo Bracchi], Raffaello A. Salimbeni, Gaston Chaïssac, Francesco Toris.