He claimed that ceramics was “the ideal of matter” and the art most akin to him after painting. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Enrico Baj (Milan, Oct. 31, 1924 – Vergiate, June 16, 2003), one of the main protagonists of 20th-century Italian art, from Oct. 8 2024 to Feb. 9, 2025, the Museum of Ceramics in Savona and MuDA – Museo Diffuso Albisola in Albissola Marina, in the venues of the Exhibition Center and Casa Museo Jorn, are hosting “BAJ. BajchezBaj.” A diffuse exhibition, curated by Luca Bochicchio and the museums’ curators, that will focus on Baj’s ceramic work in all its historical and chronological development, with a thematic focus on the 1954 International Ceramics Meeting.
The three locations will function as time capsules, reversing the routes of a historical path that saw Baj work with clay and glazes from Albisola in 1954 to Castellamonte in 1994, passing through Laveno (1955), Imola and Faenza in the early 1980s and 1990s.
The relationship between Enrico Baj, Asger Jorn and the rest of the international post-surrealist cohort will be dealt with in a specific section at the Museum of Ceramics in Savona, dedicated to the 1954 International Meeting of Ceramics, the seventieth anniversary of which, also in 2024, will be celebrated. At the MuDA Exhibition Center in Albissola Marina, the large and colorful figurative and mythological ceramics of the kitsch phase, made at Bottega Gatti in Faenza in the early 1990s, will be on display. Some of these works, as well as the grotesque tribal masks produced in Castellamonte, will find space in the other museum venues, in a synchronic arrangement based on the dialogues between works from different eras, demonstrating the transitions but also the great expressive coherence that distinguish Baj’s ceramic sculpture.
“BAJ. Baj chez Baj” is also at the Palazzo Reale in Milan. The unique catalog published by Electa
On the occasion of the centenary of the Milanese artist’s birth, and again under the title “BAJ. Baj chez Baj,” a wide-ranging retrospective promoted by the City of Milan-Cultura, produced by Palazzo Reale with Electa, and curated by Chiara Gatti and Roberta Cerini Baj opens on October 8 with nearly fifty works distilled in a time span from the early 1950s to the dawn of the 2000s.
The scientific collaboration between Savona and Milan, between the curators and institutions involved, aspires to draw two autonomous but complementary itineraries, capable of paying homage to Baj’s eclectic genius, documented in the single catalog, published by Electa, in which the two exhibition itineraries unravel among places, forms, materials and encounters, tracing the fascinating cosmogony of Baj, an epiphany of intelligence and creativity.
