Hooray for snow. Sports in the graphic production of Armando Testa – Milan – Arte.it

Milan – Armando Testa, founder of the agency of the same name in 1946, has developed over the years an unmistakable language that combines formal essence, irony and experiment.
His work, which crossed advertising, art, film, design and television and interacted with the artistic avant-gardes of his time, is now the focus of an exhibition. The Museo del Novecento in Milan, in collaboration with Testa per Testa, will welcome her from January 22 on the occasion of the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Milan Cortina.

Cervinia, 1960s, typographic print on paper mounted on canvas and frame, 70 x 100 cm | Courtesy of Gemma De Angelis Testa and TestaperTesta Photo credit: Fabio Mantegna

“Hurray for snow! Armando Testa and sports” is the title of the path that the undisputed master of Italian visual communication has dedicated to graphic production on the sports theme. Gemma De Angelis Testa and Gianfranco Maraniello, the curators of the route, propose a selection of works that cover more than thirty years of the artist’s activity and are able to transform sporting practices into metaphors of the cultural and social changes of his time. Like the first posters from the 1950s, how Moto Guzzi Lodola Sport 175 (1954), recover the modern myth of the movement, works such as Blue (1987) e Turin ’90 they elevate the sporting imagination to a cultural icon of its time.

The works on display, different in era, style and medium, testify to the artist’s extraordinary versatility and his ability to transform sport into a universal language, composed of signs, colors and visual intuitions.