Bruno Romeda. The geometries of matter
From 24 May 2024 to 31 May 2025

The event
An initiative promoted by:
Municipality of Brescia, Fondazione Brescia Musei
In collaboration with:
Municipality of Sale Marasino
Biblioteca Costanzo Ferrari
The exhibition offers an innovative perspective on Bruno Romeda’s sculpture, examining the connection between space and artwork. This theme is explored through the exhibition of the artist’s repertoire of striking bronze sculptures in geometric shapes. Circles, squares, triangles and hexagons form the core of his art and act as frames or portals capable of defining and transforming the surrounding space.
In addition to the realisation of the exhibition project, the local population will be involved with side events such as free initiatives for adults (guided tours and conferences) and educational workshops for primary and secondary schools.
The exhibition itinerary
The first room explores the relationship between space and the artwork of Bruno Romeda through his sculptural alphabet, composed of circles, squares, triangles, hexagons and lines. These elements overturn the traditional concept of sculpture as a solid, immobile mass, rather embodying the artist’s ideal of a poetics of emptiness. In this context, the sculpture is transformed into vibrant, subtle, almost pictorial strokes, outlining and delimiting a space characterised by the absence of matter.
The second room is occupied by book compartments, whose placement is maintained in respect of the usability of the library material. Here, works by the sculptor are housed close to the architectural stained glass windows. The selection of goods responds to the need to propose a game of visual juxtapositions whose aim is to make explicit the link between the artist and the territory of Sale Marasino.
The artist
Born in 1929 in Sale Marasino, Bruno Romeda spent his formative years at the Moretto Institute in Brescia. During his Italian military service, he moved to Rome, where destiny led him to meet the American artist Robert Courtright, marking the beginning of a relationship that would last over 60 years. His art, characterised by essential geometric shapes such as the square, the circle and the triangle – which he himself called the alphabet of shapes – manifests itself in innovative works of great visual impact. Metal became his medium of choice, and throughout his life he sought a direct relationship with bronze material. His works, in patinated bronze, recall the style of artists such as Cèsar Baldaccini and the American minimalists Carl André and Donald Judd, whom Romeda met in New York in the 1960s.
His work is a continuous search for balance between minimalism and complexity, between high and low, between form and matter, between reality and illusion. In the 1970s, Romeda moved with Courtright to the South of France, specifically to Opio, where he lived for the rest of his life and where he had the opportunity to perfect his expressive language. His works became part of prestigious private and public collections renowned throughout the world such as the Metropolitan Museum, New York, Musée d’Art Contemporain, Nice, Kasama Nichido Museum of Art, Andrew Crispo Gallery, New York, Kouros Gallery, New York, Galerie Jean Jacques Dutko, Paris, France, Ca’ del Bosco. In 2017, at the age of 87, Bruno Romeda passed away in Grasse, leaving a lasting legacy in the world of contemporary art.