Islands and Idols: Myth and Art at MAN in Nuoro, Italy
From June 27th to November 16th, 2025, MAN in Nuoro, Italy, opens its summer season with a powerful and poetic exhibition: “Islands and Idols”, a visual and anthropological exploration of the connection between insularity, archaic forms, and 20th-century avant-garde. The exhibition is a journey through time and matter, where past and present brush against one another and intertwine, nurturing a narrative in which myth and modernity are recognized as part of the same breath.
LEFT: Giuseppe Biasi, Women at the Lake, 1927, painting and tempera on paper, 50x55 cm, Art Collection of the Fondazione di Sardegna; RIGHT: Francis Picabia, Sunset over Port-de-Bouc, 1904, lithograph, 46x61 cm, private collection
The Island as Archetype and Inner Map
What does an island represent? A closed space, a protected elsewhere, a threshold between the visible and the invisible? “Islands and Idols” explores these questions from a non-Eurocentric perspective, deconstructing the colonial gaze and opening up to a fluid geography — where the sea is full of stories, and the island is not a limit, but a center. Within this framework, the figure of the idol — mother goddess, monolith, menhir — emerges as a symbolic element that transcends time and cultures. The exhibition brings together works by modern masters who absorbed and reinterpreted the aesthetic of the idol through their own artistic language. Joan Miró found in archaic forms a powerful reference for new sculptural vocabularies. Alberto Giacometti, through his iconic portraits, created totemic figures — silent guardians of the human essence. Among the Italians, Giuseppe Biasi, a keen interpreter of Sardinian popular culture, explored the theme of primitive sacredness in his drawings and prints. Max Pechstein, during his travels across the Pacific islands, portrayed faces and bodies infused with solemnity and symbolism. Franz Roh, both theorist and artist, contributed to the rediscovery of the archaic as a generative force within modern art, filtering primitivism through the lens of magical realism.
LEFT: Franz Roh, Harem over the Sea, n.d., photomontage of wood cut prints, 31.5x26.5 cm, private collection, Courtesy of Galleria Martini & Ronchetti, Genoa; RIGHT: Joan Miró, Untitled, c. 1974, acrylic on canvas, 163x131 cm, Palma de Mallorca, Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró a Mallorca
Dialogues with Archaicism
For Paul Gauguin, the island was an inner calling before being a geographical place. His journey to Tahiti was not a mere escape, but a radical gesture of detachment from European time and culture. In that seemingly remote context, Gauguin was not seeking the other, but an original form of existence — a more essential way of inhabiting the world and giving it shape. His wooden sculptures, created far from Western artistic conventions, were the result of a visceral search: not replicas of local symbols, but autonomous creations that shared with archaic figures the same spiritual and material tension. It was not a matter of "representing" an elsewhere, but of giving form to what is absent, to what escapes. This is why his works appear suspended — like totems outside of measurable time — rooted in an imaginary that predates any boundary between ancient and modern, sacred and everyday.
LEFT: Paul Gauguin, Landscape in Brittany – Cows at the Watering Trough, 1885, oil on canvas, Milan, Galleria d’Arte Moderna; RIGHT: Schematic Idol, Keros-Syros culture, Early Cycladic II, 2700–2300 B.C., marble, 28x14x16 cm, Paris, Musée du Louvre
Between Archaeology and Avant-Garde
Alongside the works of modern artists, the exhibition includes over 70 archaeological artifacts from museums in Sardinia and Brittany, as well as exceptional loans from the Musée du Louvre and the Menhir Museum in Laconi.
The dialogue between ancient and modern art creates a visual short circuit that reveals unexpected continuities: Cycladic statues, anthropomorphic menhirs, and Sardinian effigies seem to speak to the sculptures of Miró and the silhouettes of Arp.
LEFT: Male Menhir Statue, Bau Caddore, 2800–2500 B.C., Laconi, Museum of Prehistoric Statuary of Sardinia. Photo by Nicola Castangia; RIGHT: Jean Arp, Hurlou, 1957, bronze, 98x45x47 cm, Collection of the City of Locarno
An “Archipelagic” Display
Designed by architect Giovanni Maria Filindeu, the exhibition layout visually echoes the configuration of an archipelago, dividing the works into thematic islands. The display pedestals, made of celenit and washed sand, guide the viewer through a meditative journey where each object becomes a threshold to the elsewhere.
LEFT: Paul Gauguin, The Storyteller Speaks, 1894, woodcut, 9x11.5 cm, private collection; RIGHT: Florence Henri, Composition – The Glory That Was Greece, c. 1933, photomontage – analog photographic print from 1975, 23.5x29.5 cm, private collection © Martini & Ronchetti, courtesy of the Florence Henri Archives
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