MATERIALS: Wicker basket, military helmet, wooden coat hanger, leather pouch, hammer, military towel, dried plants and chalk writing on iron plate
DIMENSIONS: 100 × 70 × 49 cm
INSCRIPTIONS: Signed on the recto, upper right: ‘Fabio Mauri’
PROVENANCE: The artist
COLLECTION: Fabio Mauri Estate, Rome
CATALOGUE: PT_1998_910
A military wicker basket whose closed lid supports a military helmet flanked by several items, attached to a sheet of black iron: a wooden coat hanger, a leather pouch, a hammer, a military towel, chestnuts, flowers and dried plants. Amid lines and erasures traced in chalk as if it were a blackboard, the signature ‘Fabio Mauri’ and the word ‘ Rimini’ may be made out at the top of the plate; the artist’s family was displaced to Rimini in the Second World War. This work was part of the ‘Picnic o Il buon soldato’ exhibition-installation (inv. 3204).
1998, Castelluccio di Pienza (Siena), Galleria La Tartaruga, Picnic o Il buon soldato, 5 September – 11 October, curated by Benedetta Origo, Plinio De Martiis.
1999, Barcelona, Fundació “La Caixa”, La meva cosina Marcella i la guerra civil, 29 January – 21 March, curated by Martí Peran.
2013, Venice, Galleria Michela Rizzo, Fabio Mauri. Picnic o il buon soldato, 23 September – 14 December.
2014-2015, Rovereto (Trento), Mart – Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, La guerra che verrà non è la prima, 4 October – 20 September.
2015-2016, London, Hauser & Wirth, Fabio Mauri. Oscuramento. The wars of Fabio Mauri, 11 December 2015 – 6 February 2016, curated by Olivier Renaud-Clément.
Fabio Mauri. Picnic o il buon soldato, exhibition catalogue, Galleria La Tartaruga, Castelluccio di Pienza (Siena), edited by Plinio De Martiis (San Quirico d’Orcia, Siena: Editrice DonChisciotte, 1998), p. 37 (ill.).
Fabio Mauri. La meva cosina Marcella i la guerra civil, exhibition catalogue, Fundació “La Caixa”, Barcelona, edited by Martí Peran (Barcelona, 1999), p. 25 (ill.).
Fabio Mauri, “L'arte e il buon vecchio”, in Espais Reals, no. 1, Universitat de Barcelona, edited by Martí Perán, Barcelona, 2002, p. 37 (ill.).
Fabio Mauri, Io sono un ariano (Milan: Lampi di stampa, 2009), pp. 369, 372–373 (ill.).
Federica Boràgina, Fabio Mauri. Che cosa è, se è, l’ideologia nell’arte (Catanzaro: Rubbettino editore, 2012), pp. 129–131, no. 34 (ill.).
Marco Vallora, “Il tragico picnic del buon soldato di Mauri”, in La Stampa, Turin, 25 November 2013, p. 31 (ill.).
Sette, Milan, 26 September 2014, p. 57 (ill.).
L’Arena, Verona, 4 October 2014, p. 48 (ill.).
Eugenio Viola, “Fabio Mauri, coscienza critica del tempo”, in Arte, Milan, January 2016, p. 123 (ill.).
Jackie Wullschlager, “Plunged into a world of bitter coffee and creepy characters”, in Financial Times, London, 6 January 2016, p.13 (ill.).
