Exhibition | Hooray for Snow! Armando Testa and Sport

from january 22th
from tuesday to sunday, 10 am - 7:30 pm
thursday, 10 am - 10:30 pm
Last admission one hour before closing time

Exhibition | Hooray for Snow! Armando Testa and Sport

On the occasion of the Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games of Milano Cortina, the Museo del Novecento in Milan, in collaboration with Testa per Testa, presents Hooray for Snow! Armando Testa and Sport, a focused exhibition dedicated to the graphic production on the sports theme by the undisputed master of Italian visual communication.

The project, curated by Gemma De Angelis Testa and Gianfranco Maraniello, features a selection of works that span over thirty years of the artist's activity, showcasing the richness and variety of a journey where sports become a privileged ground for visual experimentation. Seven posters and an audiovisual contribution narrate the evolution of Armando Testa's language, capable of translating gesture, speed, and movement into images of extraordinary communicative effectiveness.

Armando Testa (Turin, 1917–1992), founder of the eponymous agency in 1946, developed an unmistakable language that combines formal essentiality, irony, and experimentation. His work has traversed advertising, art, design, cinema, and television, engaging with — and often anticipating — the artistic avant-gardes of his time. Testa's images do not exhaust themselves in an immediate reading but invite the public to a progressive reflection, translating gesture and movement into forms of extraordinary innovative strength.

Hooray for Snow! Armando Testa and Sport highlights the artist's ability to transform sports practices into metaphors for cultural and social changes of his time. From the early posters of the 1950s, like Moto Guzzi Lodola Sport 175 (1954), where speed and chromatic synthesis restore the modern myth of movement, to the posters for the XVII Olympic Games (1959), sport emerges as a symbol of progress and collective participation.

In the 1960s and 1970s, works like Cervinia, il Grand Prix della Pubblicità (1974/1990), and the 8° Concorso Ippico Internazionale (1968) testify to a progressive formal reduction and an increasingly absolute centrality of the image, capable of merging body, landscape, and symbol into a synthesis of great visual strength. With Azzurra (1987) and Torino '90, Testa presents emblematic images that elevate the sports imagery to a cultural icon of his time. Alongside the posters, the famous carousel Il treno per Saiwa (1966–1969) extends this research to the filmic and performative space: human bodies becoming machine and movement, anticipating experiments akin to Fluxus practices and the research of John Cage. In this continuous dialogue between project, image, and action, sport is configured for Testa as a true laboratory of forms, ideas, and visions.

The selected works – diverse in era, style, and medium – testify to the artist's surprising versatility and his ability to transform sport into a universal language made of signs, colors, and visual intuitions that still retain their communicative strength today.