Galleries - July 2018

JULY 2018 GALLERIES 43 ofthis form ofmarketing. Starting with the original Belle Époque posters, it culminates with the designs ofthe 1960s and along the way, includes the work of celebrated poster designers such as Leonetto Cappiello and Marcello Dudovich. However, it is Fortunato Depero (1892-1960), a committed Futurist artist, whose work takes centre stage. Depero joined the Futurist movement determined to “reconstruct the universe” and confident that the publicity poster was “the painting ofthe future”. Though neither was perhaps strictly true, the exhibition does show the impact both ofhis designer’s eye and the legacy of his modernising advertising campaigns. Depero’s pioneering work became and remained some ofthe company’s most important and iconic commissions, featuring puppet-like characters and witty, geometric designs. They were a step forward for the brand and his drawings were eventually used as the basis for the conical Campari Soda bottle, launched in 1932. Featuring artworks and original sketches by Depero, the exhibition also includes a number ofthe Campari’s post-war commissions, which include designs by artists such as Franz Marangolo and Bruno Munari. Patricia Derby Lee Bul’s massive mid-career retrospective, ‘Crashing’, at London’s Hayward Gallery is a fitting event for the institution’s 50th anniversary. Among the many works in the show are fragmented, female cyborgs suspended from the ceiling, a giant silver zeppelin hanging above a mirrored floor, and large, biomorphic sculptures of organic structures suggesting future evolution. Otherworldly and dreamlike, her works, from installation and sculpture to performance, tread a line between the divine and the disgusting. These are politically charged, socially conscious pieces that reflect Bul’s interest in the disconnect between surface and substance. What a contrast it makes in many essentials to the show that marked the opening of the gallery in 1968: ‘Matisse 1869-1954’, a full-career retrospective of a dead, male, European artist.Yet Matisse was truly modern and revolutionary in his day. That exhibition – though it was criticised at the time for being a late and incomplete look at a much-loved figure – still showed an artist fascinated with shape and surface, who took a particular delight in colour. And if Matisse’s show straddled the worlds of the 19th and 20th centuries, Bul does the same (with the 20th and 21st centuries) in her visual language. Yes, her works often guess at humanity’s path ahead, but recognisable in them are shapes and images from 1950s monster movies, Japanese cartoons and even – the zeppelin – early air travel’s engineering. When the Hayward opened south of the Thames in the late 1960s, the area was still one of the patently ‘unfashionable’ parts of London. While that may no longer be true, the gallery is still on a mission of self-improvement. Earlier this year it reopened following two years of refurbishment, and Bul is one of its first shows. Artists like her, grounded in the past, looking to the future and creating something new, could carry the gallery through its next 50 years. Long before the outbreak of ‘marketing’ and ‘branding’ as words in everyday use, the Italian company Campari was hard at work putting both practices into work selling its ruby-red aperitivo. The Estorick Collection’s exhibition ‘The Art of Campari’ takes a look back at some of the distinctive imagery resulting from advertising campaigns, drawing on the company’s archives in Milan and including crates, glasses, bottles and other ephemera. Today, the drink is well known, particularly for its role in the popular Negroni cocktail, but when Gaspare Campari founded the company in the 19th century, the liqueur was new and unknown. It was Gaspare’s son Davide who pursued the advertising poster as a way to bring the drink to life in the minds of the public, and the exhibition tracks the development CODA from left: L ee Bul ‘Willing To Be Vulnerable - Metalized Balloon’ Hayward Gallery Franz Marangolo ‘Campari Soda corre col tempo!’ (Campari Soda is in line with the times!) Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art C hin chin Taking shape