The Fondazione Musei Civici in Venice inaugurates the third meeting of the 'Cortocircuito' project at the Candiani Cultural Center. Dialogue between the ages', with which it was intended to propose to the entire Venice Metropolitan Area a high-value cultural program that put into play the extraordinary patrimony held in the Civic Museums.

After the first stage dedicated to Judith in art, focusing on the famous masterpiece by Gustav Klimt and the chapter that investigated the theme of the Annunciation and the light in the contemporary with the works of Titian, Fontana, Canova and Flavin, comes to Mestre the Pop Art.

Under the scientific direction of Gabriella Belli and by Antonio Homem, the exhibition around Pop Art in the Sonnabend Collection traces through a core of over forty masterpieces from the Sonnabend Collection - from 2012 in the long-term deposit at the International Art Gallery Ca 'Pesaro's modern - the extraordinary sixties in America.

It is during this period that the United States, meanwhile, has become the center of world cultural and artistic production, a new way of conceiving the work of art, which is measured by the rising mass culture and the new media.

It is a shameless and ironic but also caustic and critical of that new society, already a 'slave' of the consumer industry inebriated by that homologation that in the course of the last decades of the 20th century will be prologue to the global society of our times, Pop Art will become One of the most influential, known and persistent movements in the imagination of the 1900s.

Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Jim Dine, Tom Wesselmann, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg and many other authors will be on display with iconic works such as the Campbell's Soup Can series or Warhol's Nine Jackies - Of Ileana Sonnabend at the opening of the show - the beautiful Little Aloha and the famous Hot Dog of Lichtenstein, or even the famous Rauschenberg Combine Paintings and the legendary Figure 8 of Johns.

The great masters of the current pop are presented in Mestre along with their contemporary European artists, including Pistoletto, Arman, Christo and Mario Schifano and authors of a later generation, such as Jeff Koons and Haim Steinbach, who take Pop Art with an approach conceptual. It is a story that Ileana and her first husband, Leo, gave 'the' in America to this extraordinary artistic movement, thanks to the early discovery of the work of Rauschenberg and Johns - first performed in England - whose works were exhibited for First time in their gallery in New York, towards the end of the 1950s. The history of the Sonnabend collection is therefore one of the most fascinating collections of the 20th century. When, in November 1962, Ileana and second companion Michael Sonnabend opened their gallery in Paris, the desire to move them is to present young American artists to the public.

Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg work on a new generation of authors such as Warhol, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Rosenquist and Wesselmann, all featured in the Paris gallery. Their success is soon recognized at the Venice Biennale, when in 1964 Rauschenberg received the first prize for painting.

The exhibition, which is fully featured in the exhibition cycle presented by the Fondazione Musei Civici on the occasion of the 57th Art Biennale, is accompanied by a precious catalog published by Acqua Line (Venice, 2017), which Collects an intervention by Gabriella Belli, an interview by Elisabetta Barisoni with Antonio Homem, the Sonnabend Collection Foundation and Mario Codognato's cards.