GALLERIA DEL PREMIO SUZZARA

The Museum was founded in 2002. The collection was formed from the first edition of the Suzzara Prize in 1948. Conceived by Dino Villani, one of the fathers of publicity in our country, with the support of Mayor Tebe Mignoni and Cesare Zavattini, the Suzzara Prize was immediately distinguished by the composition of the jury, not only of gallery owners, historians and art critics, but also of a worker, a clerk and a farmer, and by the character of the prizes, consisting of products of the land or of the hands of workers. The strong symbolic value lay in equating the value of the products of artistic labour with that of the products of peasant and worker labour. The orientation towards the realist line of art involved artists such as Armando Pizzinato, Renato Guttuso, Giuseppe Zigaina, Renato Birolli, Aligi Sassu, Domenico Cantatore, Giulio Turcato, Franco Francese, Bepi Romagnoni, and Titina Maselli, and continued in the 1960s between the economic boom and civil commitment. In 1975, the Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art) was founded, which embarked on a path partly alien to the tradition of realism, involving great contemporary artists such as Mauro Staccioli, Nicola Carrino, Giosetta Fioroni, Concetto Pozzati, Gianfranco Pardi and Gianni Colombo. Since 2002, with the establishment of the Suzzara Prize Gallery Museum, a patrimony that today counts over a thousand works has been opened to the public.