Curated by Marzia Capannolo, with critical contribution by Paolo Repetto, Mani di Terra (Hands of Earth) opened on April 19, 2026 at La Crescentina’s exhibition spaces, an ambitious survey dedicated to ceramic sculpture that bridges generations of Italian and international artists.
The exhibition marks the reopening of La Crescentina’s programming. This cultural association was founded in 2021 by collectors Fiorella Miraglio and Alessandro Monteforte to promote art and culture through exhibitions, publications, and cultural events — all free and open to the public. Yet the story of La Crescentina reaches much further back: to the relationships Alessandro Monteforte cultivated from the 1960s through the early 2000s with protagonists of contemporary art, and to the large agricultural building he purchased and restored in the 1980s. What was once a gathering place for artists and intellectuals has become La Crescentina, home also to the Monteforte-Miraglio Collection — curated by Marzia Capannolo and comprising some two hundred works including paintings, sculptures, photographs, design objects, and furniture.
Mani di Terra celebrates the language of ceramics in deep connection with the surrounding territory — a landscape shaped by millennia of geological transformation, where complex strata of clay, silt, and limestone have given the local soil and sedimentary rock a striking gray-blue hue. The exhibition seeks to return matter to its origins: a cyclical return where earth — once marine mud and today solid hillside — becomes malleable once more to tell the story of artistic experience.
The exhibition path traces the rupture of traditional forms enacted by the great masters of the past, arriving at the installations and plastic experiments of today’s artists. It is a bridge between generations, revealing how earth — an ancestral material — remains one of the most vital languages of contemporary art.
Ten artists — five historical and five contemporary — guide the viewer through a reflection on the transformation of material substance into aesthetic and conceptual tension.
Thanks to collaborations with Repetto Gallery, Matèria Gallery, Galleria Riccardo Boni, Tower Gallery, the Nedda Guidi Archive, and the Mingori Collection, the exhibition features an exceptional array of works.
Of extraordinary importance is Lucio Fontana‘s (1899–1968) Crocifisso (1956), an enameled terracotta of great expressive power that pushes matter to its limit, exemplifying the artist’s ability to transform the sacred into an explosion of plastic energy and light.
Celebrated at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024 as a pioneer of “modular sculpture” in Italy, Nedda Guidi (1927–2015) is represented by a selection of works that embody her rigorous investigation of geometry and structure, reinventing earth as an architectural module — a language of philosophical precision.
Among the great 20th-century masters, Fausto Melotti (1901–1986) appears with a polychrome enameled ceramic vase (1960) and the sculpture Cartoccio (1968), which transfigure the functional object into a purely sculptural and poetic entity. Their surfaces, animated by delicate iridescent colors, merge with structures that seem to vibrate with an inner musical rhythm.
The 1970s and ’80s are represented by two works — Paesaggio (1975) and Colonna con Torre (1985) — by Nanni Valentini (1932–1985), an artist who approached earth as a sacred element, seeking to reveal the primordial bond between creative making and the origins of the cosmos.
The 20th-century section closes with three white porcelain stoneware sculptures by Carlo Zauli (1926–2002), who interpreted earth as a living force of nature. In these works, matter undergoes extreme plastic tension, appearing almost as an organic element in expansion — clods of soil upheaved by a telluric force.
This core of historical sculptures dialogues with the research of five contemporary artists, whose work testifies to the complex expressive versatility of a constantly evolving language.
Bruno Ceccobelli presents a series of lustered heads cast from his own face, steeped in symbolism and spirituality. Through his ceramics, Ceccobelli creates contemporary icons that fuse historical memory and transcendence.
Maïmouna Guerresi‘s work NÛR belongs to a new series titled Ex Voto — a reflection on the symbolic dimension of offering, sacrifice, and the relationship between the human and the mysterious. The triptych of three ceramic pieces evokes the form of the traditional ex-voto: an object charged with intention, petition, and memory.
Ana Hillar, in her works Discesa and Tummo, establishes an organic dialogue with the earth. Her pieces are fragile weavings of airy structures that evoke nature and its vital cycles, suspended between constructive strength and vulnerability.
Kazumasa Mizokami brings together Japanese sensibility and Mediterranean warmth, transforming ceramics into a world of forms saturated with intense color, where the everyday becomes visual poetry.
Riccardo Monachesi, with his Allegoria series, challenges clay’s opaque nature in pursuit of reflection and light: the ceramic becomes a thin, vibrating sheet where glaze creates mirroring surfaces that do not return a sharp image but rather a chromatic evocation of the surrounding environment.
Freed from the boundaries of applied arts, ceramics today asserts itself as pure sculptural research — capable of representing the fragile delicacy of glazed surfaces while simultaneously giving body to the material, geological force of raw earth.
Mani di Terra celebrates precisely this precarious and universal equilibrium: a journey where intellectual vision and technical mastery merge, returning to organic matter a new voice — vibrant and deeply connected to the roots of the present.
Photo credits: Laboratorio per l’Arte Mani di Terra
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