Federico Fellini: Erotic Drawings and Set Photographs Exhibition

From Thursday, April 18, the exhibition season of the Al Blu di Prussia gallery - the multidisciplinary space of Giuseppe Mannajuolo and Mario Pellegrino - continues with the exhibition "Federico Fellini: erotic drawings and photographs from the set", a tribute to Fellini as a cartoonist and comic artist. Giving voice to another aspect of the creative verve with which the Rimini director accompanied his work as a filmmaker, a corpus of 29 works on paper (in pencil, pen, marker) from the collection of Daniela Barbiani, for the first time on display in Naples, accompanied by 6 cinematic shots from the set "City of Women" from the archive of the photographer Patrizia Mannajuolo. "The drawings exhibited at Al Blu di Prussia, Mario Pellegrino explains, portray a series of characters who dialogue with their own sexual alter-ego, protagonists of wordplay and meaning, between double entendres and metaphors. A series of characters who bare their genitals, little men frightened in front of voluptuous women. The protagonists of this collection are the sexual organs themselves, always huge, exaggerated, disproportionate, genitals that dominate the man." In line with Fellini's dreamlike and satirical style, the six unpublished photographic portraits of the director that Patrizia Mannajuolo took during the making of the film "City of Women": 5 shots in black and white and 1 in color that well captures, for its pictorial quality, the atmosphere of the film and that encompasses all the emotion of a decisive encounter. A visionary season of dreams, passions, and anxieties that also returns in the drawings. Among the greatest directors in the history of Italian cinema, Federico Fellini loved to express his creativity also through drawing, cartooning, and comics, which he dedicated himself to from an early age and as a professional illustrator even before his work as a director and screenwriter. "This doodling is an ancient mania that I have always carried with me. To my collaborators, to the set designer, to the costume designer, to the makeup artist above all, I try to give ideas less approximate than those I would be able to give by expressing myself verbally, therefore already providing a graphic exemplification of the makeup I desire on that face I have chosen, or the costume to the costume designer, or a scenic idea of the environment, an attempt at a sketch. It's a way to start seeing the film face to face, to start living physically with the characters, to start surrounding myself with them. Until the film begins, the preparation does not enter a phase of authentic preparation, it is only an imagination, a series of images, faces, situations, colors that live in the sphere of the imaginative, therefore extremely fluctuating, ethereal, impalpable, ungraspable. A way to start seeing it materialized is a bit of this here of using markers, colors..." (Federico Fellini, "Intimate Dictionary by words and images" edited by Daniela Barbiani). Patrizia Mannajuolo. Neapolitan, she has been dedicated to photography from a very young age, in Rome, attending the studio of Vittorugo Contino and collaborating with directors, actors, and producers such as Roberto Rossellini and his son Renzo, Liliana Cavani, Alberto Sordi, Monica Vitti, Augusto Caminito, and Federico Fellini. The opportunity to photograph the behind-the-scenes of the film "City of Women" was for her the chance to get to know and focus on a Fellini capable of great empathy, uncompromising and tender at the same time, visionary and brilliant. Daniela Barbiani. Granddaughter of Federico Fellini, she was his assistant director from 1980 to 1993 in his last four films, And the Ship Sails On, Ginger and Fred, Interview, The Voice of the Moon. She is the author of texts and articles for publications, magazines, and catalogs, including Cahiers du Cinéma, Quoi de neuf, Fellini Amacord, Rivista di studi felliniani, I libri di casa mia, La biblioteca di Federico Fellini, Fellinicittà. In 2011 she published for Baldini&Castoldi the novel Unfaithful. She owns and curates a collection of 130 drawings that Fellini gave her and that have been exhibited in important museums and film festivals around the world. The exhibition at Al Blu di Prussia in Naples, in via Filangieri 42.From April 18 to October 31, 2024 Hours: Tuesday-Friday 10:30-13/16-20; Saturday 10:30-13.