MASI continues its series of exhibitions exploring the history of art in Ticino and its collections with a focus on Umberto Boccioni (Reggio Calabria, 1882 – Verona, 1916).

The exhibition offers an intimate and compelling insight into a decisive phase of Boccioni’s artistic development, revealing the tensions, uncertainties and contradictions that preceded his adherence to Futurism, of which he became one of the movement’s principal founders and theorists. “I’m searching, searching, searching, and not finding. Will I ever find?”, the artist wrote in his diary in March 1907. This question encapsulates the restlessness of those years and runs through the exhibition as a guiding thread.

From his earliest works of 1903–1904, through the crucial years of 1907–1909, to the formal innovations of 1911, the exhibition traces Boccioni’s constant pursuit of a new artistic language capable of expressing the modernity and dynamism of contemporary life.

The different stages of this artistic journey are illustrated through a group of fifteen works. A core selection of pre-Futurist paintings, donated to the City of Lugano by the heirs of Gabriele Chiattone, who supported and commissioned the artist during his Milan years, is presented alongside a carefully selected group of key works from the early Futurist period, on loan from important public and private collections.