A critical and public success for the master of Analytical Painting
The retrospective dedicated to Claudio Olivieri at the Museo Butti | Contemporanea in Viggiù has come to a close. Running from October 5, 2025, to January 7, 2026, this significant event powerfully marked the reopening of the museum’s exhibition season. Curated by Veronica Zanardi and Matteo Galbiati, in collaboration with the Claudio Olivieri Archive, the exhibition offered a profoundly intense critical journey through a curated selection of nine canvases and twelve works on paper.
A dialogue between history and chromatic research
This initiative reaffirmed Museo Butti’s role as a vital center for the study of Analytical Painting, continuing the legacy established by its founder, Gottardo Ortelli. The exhibition allowed visitors to retrace the artist’s entire creative trajectory: from his early experiments in 1958 and ink studies to the iconic works of the 1970s and 80s—the decades of his international consecration—concluding with the mature reflections of his 1994 and 2008 pieces.
The “Painted Poetry” of a 20th-century master
As highlighted by Professor Galbiati in the publication “I quaderni del Butti”, Olivieri’s research was a continuous challenge between the visible and the invisible. Color, treated as a lyrical medium and a shifting substance, transformed the pictorial surface into a “frontier” of light.
The exhibition successfully captured the alchemical depth of his palettes, presenting light as an active and concrete substance. It was an event that celebrated the consistency of a visual language capable of turning every limit into a new beginning, leaving an indelible mark on the history of contemporary Italian painting.