Casa Balla. Artist's house

This year MAXXI once again opens the doors of Giacomo Balla’s extraordinary house, the apartment in Rome’s Della Vittoria neighborhood where the painter, among the leading exponents of Futurism, moved in 1929 with his wife, Elisa Marcucci, and daughters, Luce and Elica. Over the following thirty years, until his death in 1958, the painter lived and worked here, transforming it into a universe full of light, color, shapes and movement that reflected the ideas expressed in the manifesto on the Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe that he signed with Fortunato Depero in 1915.

The manifesto expresses the need for a total art that influences existence through a radical transformation of the environment. Thus, the painter’s house became a laboratory of experimentation made up of painted walls and doors, a workshop in which paintings, drawings, and sculptures coexist with furniture and furnishings, utensils, clothes, and many other objects designed by him, a single and kaleidoscopic total project in which functionality and aesthetics create a new and vital union. Art invests everything, and the objects designed and built for everyday use, such as tables, chairs, shelves, easels, ashtrays, plates, tiles, make the apartment a magical realm of metamorphosis.

The painting Espansione Fiore n. 17 (dated around 1929) returns to the artist’s home, the place where the transformation of the flat into a work of ‘total’ art began, and can be seen up close in the main room of the House. This and other canvases were initially mounted in the corridor to cover the space in which the water pipes passed. They depicted the subjects of Balla’s artistic production of the 1910s and 1920s: speed, spatial dynamism, the forces of nature, puns, and Art Deco.

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