I Chose Pino Pascali Over the Beach. The Museum Changed the Artist I Thought I Knew

In June 2026, I was travelling through Puglia with a group of friends when we stopped in Polignano a Mare. It was hot, the sea was close, and everyone wanted to go to the beach. I suggested the Fondazione Pino Pascali instead.

To make the proposal more attractive, I added that the museum would probably have air conditioning. I had not checked. It was simply the strongest argument available.

It did not work.

My friends went to the beach and I told them I would join them later. I had wanted to visit the museum for years, and losing two hours of swimming seemed a reasonable price. So I walked in alone.

I knew the usual Pascali before entering: the fake weapons, the blue sea divided into metal basins, the animals made from synthetic materials, the photographs of him climbing on his own sculptures. I also knew the words that tend to gather around him: play, childhood, freedom, irony, Arte Povera.

All of this belongs to Pascali, of course. But I realised that I had been using those words almost automatically, as if they explained the work before I had looked at it.

The exhibition Pino Pascali. Dal 1956 ad oggi gave me another point of entry. Instead of beginning with the celebrated sculptor, it returned to the years in which Pascali learned to make images for a living: at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, in television studios, in advertising and in scenography. This was not background material to get through before reaching the art. It explained how much of that art became possible.

A Museum That Begins with the Artist’s Studio

The exhibition opened in October 2025, on what would have been Pascali’s ninetieth birthday, and occupies the basement of the Fondazione in Polignano a Mare. It is not a conventional retrospective filled with masterpieces borrowed from major museums. The project is designed to grow over time, using drawings, working materials, photographs, films, documents and a reconstruction of Pascali’s early Roman studio to build a critical biography of the artist.

If you enter expecting a parade of famous sculptures, you may initially feel disoriented. Much of what you see is what normally remains behind the finished work: tools, scraps, books, sketches and professional commissions. In this case, however, those materials are the real subject of the visit.

Pascali moved from Puglia to Rome in 1955 and enrolled in scenography at the Academy of Fine Arts the following year. One of his teachers was Toti Scialoja, who introduced students to American art and encouraged an experimental relationship with industrial materials. Pascali graduated in 1959, but by then he was already working outside the Academy.

The reconstructed studio makes that period feel less like a neat chapter in an art-history textbook. Pascali was moving continuously between paid work, experiments and the cultural life of Rome. The clean division between commercial image-making and the art that later made him famous belongs more to the way his career has been told than to the way he actually worked.

Before the Sculptures, There Was Carosello

In 1958, a year before graduating, Pascali began working with Sandro Lodolo’s advertising production company, Lodolofilm. The collaboration continued through most of his short career. Pascali drew characters, devised sequences, worked on scripts and created images for television commercials and opening titles.

The exhibition contains a large number of these drawings and preparatory works. Some are immediate and comic; others are surprisingly aggressive. The Algida campaign I Killers, produced between 1959 and 1962, was reportedly rejected by the company because it was considered too violent. The detail is useful because it complicates the harmless Pascali we often prefer to remember. Weapons, pursuits and exaggerated gestures were present in his visual vocabulary well before the large sculptural guns of 1965.

There are also drawings connected with Cirio and photographs Pascali took in Naples in 1965 for the television commercial Il paese del sole. He used a Linhof camera, and the camera itself appears in the exhibition. Elsewhere, sketches recall his work as an assistant scenographer for Rai programmes, including Biblioteca di Studio Uno, the popular 1964 series with the Quartetto Cetra.

This material changed the way I looked at him. Advertising had taught Pascali that an image cannot wait indefinitely for attention. It has to declare itself quickly: a silhouette, a colour, an enlargement or a well-timed visual joke must be able to stop the eye. Scenography added another lesson. An object could be false and still work perfectly from the audience’s position.

These were not minor skills that Pascali later abandoned when he became an artist. He carried them into the gallery.

His sculptures often announce themselves before we understand how they were made. We see a cannon, a whale, a bridge, a patch of sea. A moment later the construction begins to show through: the gun cannot fire, the animal has no organs and the sea fits into a geometric arrangement of containers.

The Self-Portrait Is Already a Performance

The Autoritratto in tre parti from 1968 is difficult to reconcile with the idea of the self-portrait as revelation. Pascali does not present an inner identity. He stages a sequence. Fear is introduced, apparently solved and then returned to the body through a vulgar punchline.

It is funny, but the joke is carefully constructed. Pascali understood that the artist could become part of the work’s machinery.

That understanding also explains the photographs in which he appears with his sculptures. He climbs onto them, holds them, wears them or gives them scale with his own body. The photographs are frequently used to prove his spontaneity, as though someone happened to catch him playing. Looking at the exhibition, I became less convinced by that explanation. Pascali knew exactly what a photograph could do. He had used photography professionally, worked in television and spent years inventing images meant to circulate.

His performances in front of the camera may have been playful, but they were not casual. He was building the public life of the work and, at the same time, the public figure of Pino Pascali. Once I began to see this, the familiar photographs lost some of their innocence without losing any of their energy.

How to Build a Whale

The title Piano di costruzione di una balena is unusually literal: this is not presented as a drawing of a whale, but as a plan for constructing one.

The animal is approached as a problem of outline, scale and volume. Pascali does not try to reproduce its biological truth. He identifies the minimum conditions necessary for us to recognise it, then builds an object around those conditions. The result belongs as much to the world of props and sets as it does to traditional sculpture.

This is where the advertising work becomes more than biographical background. Pascali had learned how few signs are needed to establish an image. A curved body, a tail and an exaggerated scale can summon the whale. Our imagination completes what the material does not provide.

The same method runs through the weapons. In 1965 Pascali assembled pipes, handles, old carburettors and other mechanical remains into cannons and machine guns. They resemble real weapons from a distance, although their construction soon reveals the deception. They are often described as toys, and childhood was certainly part of Pascali’s material. But calling them toys settles the question too quickly.

A fake gun can still point at someone.

It can occupy a room, impose a direction and borrow the authority of the object it imitates. Pascali removes its capacity to fire but keeps its pose. I do not read this as a simple anti-war statement; the works are too fascinated by the image of the weapon for that. Their uneasiness lies precisely there. They mock military power while preserving its visual appeal.

The exhibition section devoted to the weapons is titled Intanto noi armiamoci. Most of the large sculptures are not in the room. Instead, drawings and archival material allow the motif to be followed back into Pascali’s earlier work. That was more useful to me than seeing the weapons treated as a self-contained political cycle. The exhibition shows that they grew from the same visual culture as cartoons, adventure stories, television and children’s games.

The Sea Does Not Fit Inside the Museum

The famous 32 mq di mare circa is not the centre of this exhibition, but the material in Polignano made me reconsider it. Pascali produced the work in 1967, dividing water coloured with aniline among thirty low metal basins. Each unit measures 110 by 110 centimetres. Together they offer what the title promises: approximately thirty-two square metres of sea.

I had previously concentrated on the contrast between nature and containment: the sea measured, coloured and brought under control. I still see that tension, but after Polignano it no longer seems sufficient.

Pascali was born near this sea. In his conversation with Carla Lonzi, he spoke about the rocks and the water as the landscape of his childhood. The work is therefore neither a neutral exercise in modular sculpture nor an untouched fragment of nature. It is a remembered sea rebuilt through the techniques of a scenographer.

There is something moving in the inadequacy of the attempt. Thirty basins can indicate a sea, reflect its colour and occupy an impressive area of the gallery. They cannot produce a horizon. They cannot give us its smell, depth or movement. The word circa in the title admits the approximation with a smile.

Pascali does not bring the sea into the museum. He shows how readily we accept a substitute.

This is also why the work has survived its period so well. We now encounter landscapes constantly through screens, tourist campaigns, satellite maps and environmental data. Pascali’s sea belongs to an earlier technological world, yet its central trick remains familiar: an immense physical reality is reduced to an image we can possess at a glance.

The Last Room

The exhibition ends with Cinque bachi da setola e un bozzolo, made in 1968. Five long creatures built from acrylic bristles and metal structures occupy the floor. The Italian title turns on a small verbal mutation: setola means bristle; seta means silk.

They are ridiculous and elegant. They look alive even though their industrial construction is impossible to overlook. Pascali does not conceal the metal or disguise the synthetic bristles. The animal appears through the material rather than behind it.

This final room prevents the exhibition from becoming a documentary archive. After the drawings, photographs, television material and professional commissions, the sculptures return. By then, however, they look different.

Seen after the advertising drawings and the scenographic material, the bristles no longer felt like an unconventional material chosen simply to break with traditional sculpture. They behaved like performers. Made for one practical function, they had acquired a body, a rhythm and an absurd personality. Pascali knew how to direct that transformation because he had spent years constructing scenes and commercial images from a limited number of signs.

Pascali was included by Germano Celant in the emerging history of Arte Povera, but the label accounts for only part of what happens here. The work remains theatrical, attached to fiction and unusually alert to publicity. Pascali did not only select materials; he knew how to put them on stage.

The Artist I Had Simplified

When I left the Fondazione, my friends were still at the beach. I joined them eventually, although by then I was thinking less about the sea in front of me than about the one Pascali had rebuilt in thirty metal containers.

I had not discovered a secret Pascali. Much of what I saw has long been known and documented. The advertising work, the Rai scenographies and the photographs were never hidden. I had simply kept them in a secondary category, separate from the sculptures that mattered.

The museum corrected that hierarchy.

Pascali’s short career is often told with the speed of a legend. He arrived, played, overturned sculpture and died in Rome in 1968 at the age of thirty-two, after a motorcycle accident. The legend contains enough truth to be convincing. It also makes his work appear more instinctive than it was.

What I saw in Polignano was an artist who understood construction, timing and the behaviour of images. He knew how television concentrates attention, how advertising turns a sign into desire, how scenery produces a believable space and how photography can transform both an artwork and its author into an event.

Knowing this did not reduce the pleasure of the work. It made me less willing to treat that pleasure as something spontaneous or innocent.

The weapons remain fake and threatening. The whale remains visibly constructed and somehow present. The synthetic worms are still comic enough to make us smile. The sea is still beautiful, although we know perfectly well that it is only coloured water arranged on a museum floor.

I entered the Fondazione believing that play was the key to Pascali. I left thinking that construction was closer to the truth. He did not escape reality through imagination. He learned how reality could be rebuilt from a few persuasive signs — and how eagerly the rest of us would complete the illusion.

For once, my friends had been right about the beach. It was hot, and the sea was magnificent.

I was still glad I had chosen the fake one first.

Related Articles

• Arte Povera: Embracing Simplicity and the Richness of Poor Materials
• Neo-Dada Explained: How Rauschenberg, Johns, and Manzoni Turned Everyday Life into Art
• Michelangelo Pistoletto at 93: “The Mirror Does Not Lie; It Is We Who Distort the Truth”
• Giuseppe Penone: Trees, Touch and the Memory of Nature
• Environmental Art: A Contemporary Exploration of Nature