Frigidaire. Storia e immagini della più rivoluzionaria rivista d’arte del mondo

Founded by Vincenzo Sparagna and the cartoonists Stefano Tamburini, Andrea Pazienza, Filippo Scozzari, Massimo Mattioli and Tanino Liberatore, a group that had met a few years earlier in the editorial staff of the satirical magazine “Il Male”, “Frigidaire” first hit the newsstands in November 1980. Unique in its kind, the magazine transversally crosses news and fiction, comics and reportage, art, literature and philosophy, cinema, music, theatre, satire and photography, opening up to the most diverse creative energies and even international collaborations to recount its time, underground movements and the cultural and social transformations taking place with a radical freedom of expression.

The Museo di Roma in Trastevere is presenting to the public the most spectacular images and the many famous artistic figures that appeared in its pages. The exhibition is promoted by Roma Capitale, Assessorato alla Cultura, Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali, and organized by Frigolandia, the art and communication center founded in 2005 in Umbria that also houses the archives of 42 years of publication of “Frigidaire” and “Il Nuovo Male”. The magazine ran on newsstands until 2017. Since then, when most newsstands closed, it has only been distributed to subscribers or those who request it.

The exhibition includes over three hundred works, with various examples of Arte Maivista (Neverseen Art), a definition created by Andrea Pazienza and Vincenzo Sparagna to indicate that unforeseen, multiple, high, low, medium, pop and anti-pop art, invented, and published, from 1977 onwards by magazines such as “Frigidaire”, “Cannibale”, “Il Male”, and “Frìzzer”. Iconic issues, covers, original plates, graphics, photographs and reports are the means to tell a vast and transversal audience the story of “Frigidaire” and its different souls, a world that has involved and still involves different generations and escapes any classification.  

Photo FRIGIDAIRE il ballo di Ranxerox